SHAR­LENE RAM­PER­SAD

Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley is warn­ing cit­i­zens to pre­pare for dif­fi­cult days ahead.

He made the state­ment at the Na­tion­al Acad­e­my for Per­form­ing Arts (NA­PA) yes­ter­day as he de­liv­ered re­marks for the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM’s) 67th-an­niver­sary cel­e­bra­tion.

Tak­ing the stage to much fan­fare, the Prime Min­is­ter spent some time prais­ing the par­ty’s found­ing mem­bers and list­ing its achieve­ments over the years.

But a hush fell over the crowd of par­ty mem­bers when Row­ley be­gan to out­line the dif­fi­cul­ties that may be on the hori­zon for T&T.

“I don’t want you for one minute to be­lieve it is go­ing to be plain sail­ing in Trinidad and To­ba­go, there are dif­fi­cult times ahead and we have to pre­pare to deal with those dif­fi­cult times and it is not every­thing that we are ac­cus­tomed to that we can claim as an en­ti­tle­ment be­cause cir­cum­stances change,” he said.

The Prime Min­is­ter said cit­i­zens have to be able to man­age the change and sur­vive with­in the chang­ing en­vi­ron­ment.

He asked the au­di­ence what their re­ac­tion would be to learn­ing that the coun­try may on­ly have enough gas to last for the next 10 to 12 years. Row­ley said at that time, things could change so sig­nif­i­cant­ly that the State would not be able to af­ford to give the pop­u­la­tion cer­tain things.

“There is a com­mon say­ing in this coun­try, “It have more mad peo­ple out­side than in­side the mad­house” and that might be true be­cause how do you ex­plain to an ed­u­cat­ed pop­u­la­tion that we are in fact ben­e­fit­ing large­ly from State sup­port where our bills are be­ing paid in many ar­eas by the state through pub­lic pol­i­cy,” he said.

He said among those bills were elec­tric­i­ty, wa­ter, the health care sec­tor, pub­lic trans­port and in­ter-is­land trav­el.

And with nu­mer­ous com­plaints about a pro­posed hike in elec­tric­i­ty rates, the Prime Min­is­ter sought to ra­tio­nalise the in­crease, say­ing T&TEC was cur­rent­ly op­er­at­ing in the red, ow­ing bil­lions to the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny (NGC) for nat­ur­al gas.

“The com­pa­ny that is sup­ply­ing it (elec­tric­i­ty) to you, if you do their ac­counts, re­ceiv­ables and payables, you will see that there is a sig­nif­i­cant gap there and its called bank­rupt­cy,” he said.

He rub­bished calls for the Gov­ern­ment to get in­volved with the pro­posed in­crease, say­ing that was the sole re­spon­si­bil­i­ty of the Reg­u­lat­ed In­dus­tries Com­mis­sion (RIC), a State agency cre­at­ed un­der the law to set and man­age util­i­ty rates.

Row­ley al­so went af­ter those who say it was not a good time to in­crease the elec­tric­i­ty rates, ask­ing, “When is a good time? There are al­ways chal­lenges, what we are re­quired to do is make good de­ci­sions in the best in­ter­est of Trinidad and To­ba­go.”