Tis the time of year when resolutions are made and intentions are sworn to be accomplished in the year ahead. Gratuitous as it may be taken, we proffer a couple critical matters for Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley to take seriously as his Government enters the eighth year of its pledge and responsibility to the country.
One, Prime Minister Rowley, you and your Government must seriously counter the widespread assault of criminality on the population. Instead of being abated over the last 20 years, at least, and notwithstanding the billions expended, the human and physical resources and the often empty chatter accompanying both, launched against crime, the terror of citizens is palpable everywhere.
Commissioners of police, ministers of national security and prime ministers, past and present, can point to a few statistics of incremental “success” against crime as much as they like, the fact is brutal, on occasion, incomprehensibly violent crime has overcome us as a society.
The interminable passage of legislation, every one said to be the panacea for crime, equipping the police with manpower and physical infrastructure and more have made little or no impression.
So too have Government social programmes for young people. In instances such programmes have brought hundreds into forms of employment and skills learning; that has not prevented hundreds more from gravitating to criminal gangs.
Prime Minister Rowley, you and your Government, not the police, have complete political and moral responsibility to subdue crime.
The second resolution we place in front of Prime Minister Rowley is one closely related to the first. The Government must initiate the transformation of the economy to at least attenuate the historical dependence on the “one crop” syndrome – previously sugar and a couple other agricultural products; today energy. Yes, there are many causes of crime, young people left without the hope for training and jobs is surely one such trigger.
More than two years ago, in acknowledgement of its responsibility and pledge to bolster the non-energy sector, PMr Rowley established and took charge of the Roadmap to Recovery Committee. The PM also abolished the Economic Development Advisory Board, so assured was he that the Roadmap plan would bring defining results.
Well, Mr Prime Minister, the economy has not experienced those new buds of growth to support the energy sector. Instead, economic growth is dependent for gasps of life on international energy price increases.
Whether you accept it or not, and it’s a common practice of politicians in office to deny responsibility for that which is negative, yours is that historical task to transform the “Plantation Economy” from producing a couple agricultural products for consumption in the Metropole. You can seek to evade what you aspired to in your campaigning; but such failures will not go away.
It’s acknowledged that in small, open economies such as T&T, it is the government which has to lay the foundational plans and programmes to focus the efforts of the private sector to invest in innovative ideas for the production of goods and services. Can you say, Mr Prime Minister, with conviction, that your Government has done so?
So Prime Minister Rowley, you have an outstanding deficit in what you and your Government promised to accomplish.