Brent Zephyrine

While Trinidad and To­ba­go may be "blessed with oil and gas," it may very well al­so be a "curse," which has tem­porar­i­ly "in­su­lat­ed" the coun­try from the re­al­i­ties of eco­nom­ic in­sta­bil­i­ty. These were the sen­ti­ments ex­pressed by po­lit­i­cal leader of the Con­gress of the Peo­ple (COP) Prakash Ra­mad­har dur­ing a ses­sion at the par­ty's Op­er­a­tions Cen­tre, at Char­lieville, on Sat­ur­day. In open­ing re­marks at the par­ty's in­for­mal post-bud­get dis­cus­sion, Ra­mad­har re­it­er­at­ed the Gov­ern­ment's com­mit­ment to pro­mote sus­tain­abil­i­ty. Com­ment­ing to the bud­get de­liv­ered last Mon­day by his pre­de­ces­sor and Min­is­ter of Fi­nance Win­ston Dook­er­an, Ra­mad­har high­light­ed that bud­gets are not about giv­ing "po­lit­i­cal good­ies" and do­ing what is pop­u­lar but mak­ing hard de­ci­sions and do­ing what is right.

He urged the gath­er­ing of some 20 peo­ple to re­flect on what it meant to be an in­de­pen­dent na­tion able "to meet its ba­sic needs by it­self" and en­cour­aged cit­i­zens to be self-re­liant. "I think it is a sin to take away the rights of a per­son by giv­ing them no op­por­tu­ni­ty oth­er than to be­lieve they must de­pend on the State for their needs," Ra­mad­har said. "We can­not be sus­tained for­ev­er and it was time for lead­er­ship to take away the re­liance of peo­ple on gov­ern­ment and give them their true in­de­pen­dence."