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Friday, July 25, 2025

Reality check needed to go forward

by

20170107

Most se­nior fi­nan­cial prac­ti­tion­ers I have spo­ken to can­not see to­tal gov­ern­ment rev­enue top­ping $30 bil­lion in 2017, while we are bud­get­ed to spend $53 dol­lars.

Faced with a sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tion two years ago, the Gov­ern­ment of Suri­name took the coura­geous de­ci­sion to cut their bud­get in half, and while this de­ci­sion has caused a de­gree of ear­ly suf­fer­ing for their cit­i­zens, at least they are now back to liv­ing in the re­al world.

We in T&T are not.

We are sim­ply liv­ing in dream land with a huge­ly un­sus­tain­able bud­get deficit for the past two years while we con­tin­ue to bor­row our way to the gates of hell.

Mean­while, labour unions are lin­ing up to re­ceive wage set­tle­ments pred­i­cat­ed on an econ­o­my that dis­ap­peared three years ago.

To high­light how ab­surd some of these de­mands are, an of­fice clean­er at Petrotrin has a high­er base salary than a cab­in crew purs­er on Caribbean Air­lines.

When next you speak to the se­nior of­fi­cer of a lead­ing bank branch man­ag­er at a shop­ping mall, un­der­stand that he or she has a salary that is on par with a truck dri­ver at Petrotrin.

Turn­ing to the po­lice ser­vice, a con­sta­ble in Trinidad makes four times the salary of his coun­ter­part in Guyana.

The ra­tio­nale for these very high salaries com­pared to our Caribbean coun­ter­parts no longer ex­ists and all par­ties need to ful­ly di­gest the new re­al­i­ties here for us to col­lec­tive­ly chart a suc­cess­ful way for­ward.

Fur­ther­more, Petrotrin has debt it can nev­er pay and is los­ing hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars an­nu­al­ly, while it has more than twice the num­ber of em­ploy­ees need­ed to run the re­fin­ery.

Gre­go­ry Wight

Mar­aval


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