Use businessmen to achieve goal, Bharath

Earlier this week, the TTMA hosted a discussion forum with new Trade and Industry Minister Vasant Bharath. After an excellent address by TTMA president Dominic Hadeed outlining most of the difficulties manufacturers and all businessmen face in T&T, Bharath took the podium.

A communicator par excellence, Bharath highlighted, among other relevant statistics, T&T’s very low world ranking on the competitiveness and ease-of-doing business scales. He promised to address these issues with so much urgency that by 2015, he assured his audience, we will be in the top ten ranking of these two vital components of business success.

Now, I did not get a chance to say so but the minister will have to somehow engineer a total change in the culture of the public service if he is going to achieve these admirable objectives. We all know the stories of Greece and Germany and our public servants operate largely in the fantasy realm of the Greek public servant and not the German. Changing their orientation will take a massive dose of clever persuasion and I wish Minister Bharath well in this noble objective.

I would like to humbly suggest that he looks at engaging the services of actual business operators to talk to key groups of public servants to help them see the way to a more efficient tomorrow.

Gregory Wight
Diego Martin