Gail Alexan­der

Se­nior Po­lit­i­cal Re­porter

Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress (UNC) Fyz­abad can­di­date Dave Tan­coo has again promised there will be no de­val­u­a­tion un­der a UNC gov­ern­ment and that the par­ty has a plan for Ce­dros/Moru­ga area which would tap in­to op­por­tu­ni­ties in near­by Guyana and Suri­name.

Speak­ing at Wednes­day’s UNC meet­ing in Point Fortin, he said, “The out­go­ing prime min­is­ter says UNC is go­ing to de­val­ue the cur­ren­cy from TT$15 to US$1. Do you hear lie? Dat is lie!”

He added, “No de­val­u­a­tion un­der a UNC gov­ern­ment. Our leader has said that time and time again ... lemme say it again: no de­val­u­a­tion un­der the UNC, so that deals with lie num­ber one.”

He said the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment’s (PNM) biggest prob­lem was query­ing where the UNC was get­ting the mon­ey from to do in­fra­struc­tur­al works and build and de­vel­op T&T. He said the irony was that none of this is new.

“Over the past ten years, we’ve been telling the PNM gov­ern­ment what to do to save T&T, and they’ve re­fused to,” he said.

He said there were sev­er­al ways to get the mon­ey.

“I can­not deal with all tonight, so I’ll just give you a snap­shot,” Tan­coo said.

The first thing to do, Tan­coo claimed, was stop cor­rup­tion and rack­et. He said the pro­cure­ment reg­u­la­tor’s re­port not­ed that in one year, $5 bil­lion in con­tracts un­der the PNM were giv­en out “il­le­gal­ly.”

“State bod­ies were giv­ing out these state con­tracts,” he added, “al­leged­ly” to “PNM friends, fam­i­ly and fi­nanciers.”

If this was done over ten years, Tan­coo said that would pro­duce $50 bil­lion.

“So that’s the first way. If you stop that, you have enough mon­ey to start every sin­gle project to di­ver­si­fy the econ­o­my.”

He added, “The next thing to do is di­ver­si­fy the rev­enue base. If you want to gen­er­ate mon­ey, you have to di­ver­si­fy the econ­o­my and find new rev­enue sources.

“Don’t do like the PNM and sell the chick­en. In fact, they do worse than sell it—dey mash down the chick­en, kill him and look­ing for the egg. They mash up Petrotrin, and now we ent have no for­eign ex­change.”

Tan­coo said di­ver­si­fy­ing the rev­enue base al­so in­volved look­ing at ex­ist­ing in­dus­tries and new ones.

“In ex­ist­ing in­dus­tries, you have to im­prove the ease of do­ing busi­ness, make peo­ple want to in­vest in T&T and make peo­ple in T&T want to put mon­ey in­to start­ing busi­ness­es.”