Last week, Planning Minister Bhoe Tewarie hosted a press conference at the new home of the Central Statistical Office (CSO) on Frederick Street, in the heart of the capital.
The purpose of the press conference was to highlight the achievements and the present status of the CSO in overcoming the challenges that lead the national statistical system.
To the uninitiated, such an event may seem like a minister indulging in some political chest-beating, aimed at scoring some positive points for the ruling party less than six weeks away from the 2015 general election.
That the CSO has a new home for all of its 350 staff members, however, takes on added significance when the fact that this vital statistical institution had been without a place to call its own for more than two years.
In May 2013, the Occupational Safety and Health Authority (OSHA) declared the previous headquarters of the CSO on Independence Square unfit for human occupation because of leaks in the building and electrical issues.
As a result of the OSHA violation, the staff of the CSO were forced to move from Independence Square with some occupying office space at Park Street, others in a building at Furness Court, and some operating from home. Late last year, some CSO staffers were housed at the Capital Plaza on Frederick Street.
This state of homelessness must have had a devastating impact on the morale of the CSO staff. It certainly had a deleterious consequence for the output of the CSO to the point that the "inadequate provision of vital macro-economic data" was itemised as one of the drivers of the decision by the Moody's rating agency to downgrade T&T in April this year.
Even more humiliatingly for the CSO staff and its minister was the fact that the Government was publicly excoriated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in its 2014 Article IV consultation report on T&T.
"The CSO," the IMF stated in June 2014, "has yet to move into suitable quarters and remains woefully under-staffed and under-resourced. The production of critical data (including GDP, trade, and labour, as well as tourism statistics) continues to fall further behind, grinding to a halt in critical areas and rendering the conduct of surveillance ever harder."
The stinging criticisms of both Moody's and the IMF simply underscore the critical importance of the collection, analysis and distribution of economic, financial, social and labour statistics and data in the running of modern, inter-connected economies.
While the fact that the CSO has a new home and also a new website must be celebrated, Minister Tewarie really must explain why it took him more than two years to reverse the state of vagrancy to which the country's premier statistical institution had been consigned.
And the Government must account for the fact that its ongoing maintenance of its buildings throughout the length and breadth of the country is so poor that the staff of an important public service division could be forced out of their offices.
All of this must be seen in the context of the fact that the People's Partnership administration has allowed four government-owned, multi-storey office buildings at the Richmond Street Campus in Port-of-Spain to stand empty for the last five years.