Not too many Caribbean is­lands can boast of hav­ing a prime min­is­ter who is not on­ly an avid crick­eter, but who is al­so a for­mer uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sor in math­e­mat­ics and a ded­i­cat­ed ad­vo­cate for sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy train­ing for de­vel­op­ment.

Kei­th Claudius Mitchell gained a BSc de­gree in Math­e­mat­ics and Chem­istry at UWI, fol­lowed by a mas­ter's de­gree from Howard Uni­ver­si­ty and a doc­tor­ate in math­e­mat­ics and sta­tis­tics from the Amer­i­can Uni­ver­si­ty. He taught at Howard Uni­ver­si­ty from 1977 to 1983, and has writ­ten sev­er­al text­books on math­e­mat­ics for Caribbean stu­dents.

For­mer cap­tain of the Grena­da crick­et team in 1973, he has been the leader of the New Na­tion­al Par­ty since 1989. He's proved him­self to be a vet­er­an politi­cian, win­ning the pop­u­lar vote in Grena­da four times: in 1995 (when he first be­came PM), 1999, 2003, and most re­cent­ly, in the Feb­ru­ary 2013 Grena­da na­tion­al elec­tion, when thou­sands of the un­em­ployed vot­ed for his New Na­tion­al Par­ty (NNP).Faced with a large na­tion­al debt, PM Mitchell's NNP ad­min­is­tra­tion has de­cid­ed to im­ple­ment an IMF struc­tur­al ad­just­ment pro­gramme.

SHEREEN ALI spoke to Dr Mitchell last week Mon­day dur­ing his vis­it to Trinidad to seek greater re­gion­al in­vest­ment. Prime Min­is­ter Mitchell is al­so the Min­is­ter of In­for­ma­tion, Im­ple­men­ta­tion, Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty, Dis­as­ter Man­age­ment and Home Af­fairs in Grena­da.

Q: What are some of the in­ter­ests you are work­ing to­wards with your vis­it to T&T?

A: In­ter­est from Trinida­di­ans about in­vest­ment in Grena­da is based on a his­toric re­la­tion­ship. Giv­en the strong fam­i­ly con­nec­tion be­tween the two coun­tries, we have al­ways felt that this is an im­por­tant area to at­tract se­ri­ous in­vest­ment in­to Grena­da. There are in­ter­ests in the tourism and agri­cul­tur­al sec­tors. There is some in­ter­est al­ready, and we would cer­tain­ly like to see a lot more.

I al­so want to use the op­por­tu­ni­ty [of my vis­it] to pay my re­spects to the for­mer prime min­is­ter Patrick Man­ning, who has been a very good friend to Grena­da. I al­ways re­mem­ber his in­ter­est when [hur­ri­cane] Ivan struck and to­tal­ly de­stroyed our coun­try. He was the first Prime Min­is­ter to come in­to Grena­da and lit­er­al­ly spend a whole day with me, on a per­son­al lev­el...he came as Patrick, to a friend, Kei­th.

He spent the en­tire day with me at my home...his view was that: if I am not OK per­son­al­ly, then he would not be in a po­si­tion as prime min­is­ter to be there for me...I have nev­er for­got­ten that.

It is well known that Trinidad played a ma­jor role in Grena­da's re­vival. So my vis­it is twofold: to pay a per­son­al vis­it to Patrick Man­ning, and al­so, to touch base with some key busi­ness peo­ple who have se­ri­ous in­ter­est in in­vest­ment in Grena­da.

What ad­van­tages does Grena­da of­fer to in­vestors in tourism and oth­er busi­ness­es?

For one, the sta­bil­i­ty of Grena­da is cru­cial. When peo­ple come to Grena­da, there is a sense of peace and or­der.Giv­en the gov­ern­ment ini­tia­tive in pro­vid­ing in­cen­tives for peo­ple to take risk, we have stat­ed con­sis­tent­ly that our pol­i­cy is to in­crease se­ri­ous pri­vate sec­tor ini­tia­tive in de­vel­op­ment of the coun­try as a way to reach Grena­da's true po­ten­tial.

So we are less­en­ing the role of the pub­lic sec­tor in terms of its "over-reach" in the econ­o­my, and ex­pand­ing the role of the pri­vate sec­tor. The phi­los­o­phy of the gov­ern­ment is to en­cour­age peo­ple to in­vest. There are very at­trac­tive in­vest­ment pack­ages in var­i­ous ar­eas.

Be­sides that, let's face it, the beau­ty of Grena­da. The good thing about our coun­try is that we have a very di­ver­si­fied tourism prod­uct. Many coun­tries have a beach-type tourism ac­tiv­i­ty, and that's the end of the sto­ry. We have a mixed tourism prod­uct: the eco-tourism po­ten­tial is ex­treme­ly ex­cit­ing. We have lakes and wa­ter­falls. And we have the beach and Grand Anse and oth­er places. So there are enor­mous pos­si­bil­i­ties for peo­ple in­ter­est­ed in all types of tourism ac­tiv­i­ties.

Plus, our agri­cul­tur­al ac­tiv­i­ties have rich op­por­tu­ni­ties: our co­coa is known as one of the best co­coa in the world, and there is nut­meg.

The nut­meg in­dus­try was dev­as­tat­ed by the hur­ri­canes of Ivan in 2004 and Emi­ly in 2005. How is that in­dus­try re­cov­er­ing?

It's com­ing...a lot of the trees have been re­sus­ci­tat­ed. But clear­ly we need a lot more in­vest­ment in that area. And the ques­tion is the avail­abil­i­ty of re­sources to re­al­ly ex­pand the sec­tor in the way we want it to. One prob­lem is the lack of at­trac­tion for young peo­ple to get in­volved. Ba­si­cal­ly, we have not had the re­sources nec­es­sary to in­vest, to see the true po­ten­tial of the sec­tor and to en­cour­age young peo­ple.

They want to see a use­ful lifestyle. Not like in my fa­ther's time, when you don't get to seey­our fruits grow. Young peo­ple to­day need to see a use­ful lifestyle. Gov­ern­ment sim­ply does not have the re­sources for the nec­es­sary in­vest­ment [to make that hap­pen for them].

In view of your cur­rent in­vest­ment thrust, how se­cure is the off­shore bank­ing sec­tor now, since the many bank­ing, mon­ey laun­der­ing and bribery scan­dals in the late 90s and ear­ly 2000s, in­clud­ing one in­volv­ing the First In­ter­na­tion­al Bank of Grena­da, when Gilbert Ziegler de­fraud­ed in­vestors of mil­lions of dol­lars? What mea­sures are in place to pro­tect both in­vestors and the pub­lic in­ter­est in monies ear­marked for pub­lic sec­tor in­vest­ment ini­tia­tives?

Fol­low­ing the dif­fi­cul­ties of the ear­ly 2000s, Grena­da em­barked on a mas­sive clean-up of the sec­tor. As a con­se­quence, there are no off­shore banks op­er­at­ing in Grena­da. Next, we es­tab­lished a strong reg­u­la­to­ry frame­work with the es­tab­lish­ment of the Grena­da Au­thor­i­ty for the Reg­u­la­tion of Fi­nan­cial In­sti­tu­tions (Garfin) in 2006. This au­thor­i­ty is re­spon­si­ble for reg­u­lat­ing all non-bank fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions in­clud­ing off­shore fi­nan­cial ser­vices. To­day, Garfin is a mod­el in­sti­tu­tion.

At present, we are ex­am­in­ing whether, and to what ex­tent, there may be new op­por­tu­ni­ties in the off­shore sec­tor, though not nec­es­sar­i­ly in bank­ing. One thing is very clear: we are go­ing to be very se­lec­tive in fu­ture. More­over, the en­dur­ing les­son of the past is that the pro­mo­tion of new busi­ness must be ac­com­pa­nied by strong reg­u­la­tion.

What are the busi­ness op­por­tu­ni­ties for in­vestors from T&T?

Sev­er­al. For in­stance, leas­ing the es­tates. There are sev­er­al Trinida­di­ans who have al­ready [ex­pressed in­ter­est] in ac­quir­ing leas­es and in­vest­ing heav­i­ly, in sour­sop pro­duc­tion, for in­stance. You know, sour­sop is seen as the "mir­a­cle drug" now. Al­so, our co­coa is one of the best in the world. They are mak­ing choco­late bars right now that sell all over Eu­rope. Every bit they pro­duce, they sell. But the re­sources to re­al­ly ex­pand are need­ed. The job cre­ation from this is quite promis­ing.

In light man­u­fac­tur­ing, for ex­am­ple, there are many prod­ucts made from nut­meg–oils, soaps, oth­er prod­ucts–but again, in­vest­ment is the prob­lem.

What at­trac­tions are you of­fer­ing in­vestors?

The tax in­cen­tives are very lib­er­al. Al­so, get­ting your cash back out–there is no lim­i­ta­tion on this. You can ex­port your cash back to wher­ev­er you wish to. There is no hin­drance at all in that re­spect. Gov­ern­ment is not go­ing to in­ter­fere with a lot of tax­es.The coun­try will ben­e­fit from the de­vel­op­ment in terms of job cre­ation, and we get some­thing out of the ex­port earn­ings pro­duced. So there's a lot of po­ten­tial there.

The un­em­ploy­ment lev­el in Grena­da is re­al­ly high: 30 to 40 per cent. That must be ex­treme­ly chal­leng­ing to deal with.

Ex­treme­ly chal­leng­ing. And we're deal­ing with a young pop­u­la­tion. For job cre­ation, the tourism sec­tor is key. Right now, we have a few ho­tel projects com­ing on stream and they are look­ing at train­ing peo­ple. We are al­so do­ing a lot of train­ing; over 3,000 young peo­ple are ac­tive­ly train­ing in var­i­ous sec­tors, par­tic­u­lar­ly hos­pi­tal­i­ty arts. So that when the jobs come, we won't have to im­port peo­ple.

One of the key fac­tors for de­vel­op­ing these small economies is in­for­ma­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tions tech­nol­o­gy (ICT). We are deeply work­ing that par­tic­u­lar area be­cause the ICT plat­form is key in de­vel­op­ing our econ­o­my, not on­ly for the di­rect job po­ten­tial, but in terms of im­prov­ing ser­vices.

There is wastage in the Gov­ern­ment bu­reau­cra­cy–I'm sure it ex­ists here too, and all over the re­gion–be­cause we have sim­ply not used enough tech­nol­o­gy in our op­er­a­tion. We are still op­er­at­ing in a lot of ar­cha­ic ways; we need to mod­ernise to gain more ben­e­fit for the re­sources that we are in­vest­ing in.

So we are try­ing to get more peo­ple in­to IT ser­vices in the coun­try.For in­stance, look at what's hap­pen­ing in In­dia. In­di­ans went abroad and gained a lot of ex­pe­ri­ence and knowl­edge, and re­turned home, cre­at­ing firms that now pro­vide out­sourc­ing ser­vices all over the world.

Grena­da was de­clared bank­rupt by the Wash­ing­ton-based In­ter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund (IMF) in Sep­tem­ber 2013. How is this sit­u­a­tion to­day? Has it been im­prov­ing?

We met a very chal­leng­ing sit­u­a­tion–there was very poor man­age­ment of the econ­o­my when we left of­fice. We were in gov­ern­ment from 1995 to 2008; dur­ing that pe­ri­od the av­er­age growth rate of the coun­try was five to six per cent. The on­ly two bad years were the year of 9/11–2001–which af­fect­ed the tourism prod­uct of the en­tire re­gion; and the year of hur­ri­cane Ivan, 2004, when the whole coun­try was de­stroyed. But out­side of that, in the econ­o­my we were meet­ing our re­spon­si­bil­i­ties and cre­at­ing jobs in the coun­try.

But since we left of­fice in 2008, the pre­vi­ous gov­ern­ment made a mess of things to the point that they had neg­a­tive growth for four and a half years. We are just back, and al­ready we are back in pos­i­tive num­bers. The econ­o­my must be cre­at­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties, and there must be ex­pan­sion in sev­er­al ar­eas, for you to have the job op­por­tu­ni­ties for peo­ple.The fun­da­men­tal prob­lem that we met was that the coun­try was in dire shape....

What they did to pay salaries every month was sell as­sets. And if all you are do­ing in a busi­ness is every month you sell a piece of the busi­ness to pay work­ers, then soon you will not have a busi­ness to run.

They were just sell­ing land, build­ings, they sold all the shares we had in the elec­tric­i­ty com­pa­ny, the tele­phone com­pa­ny...They were just sell­ing every­thing. In fact there is some land that we thought we had, which we were think­ing of build­ing ho­tels on, but when we checked, the NIS bought it. We are now ne­go­ti­at­ing with NIS to get it back.

So the fact is, they weren't pay­ing debts. Not to UWI, or oth­er bod­ies. The Caribbean De­vel­op­ment Bank (CDB) was down­grad­ed twice be­cause of Grena­da. You know what that means for the en­tire re­gion, be­cause the down­grade meant that more mon­ey from CDB would costs the in­di­vid­ual gov­ern­ments more. So they were ow­ing the CDB mil­lions of dol­lars. Two weeks af­ter I came in, for ex­am­ple, I had to find five mil­lion dol­lars to pay CDB. And they were beg­ging me: please, if you don't pay, they will down­grade us again...

So we had to get in­to a struc­tured pro­gramme with the IMF and the World Bank: (say­ing) this is where we are.

Soon I should be sign­ing a let­ter of in­tent with the IMF and the World Bank which trig­gers the pro­gramme where we would ex­pect to get some debt re­lief, and al­so some cash to in­vest in sev­er­al ar­eas, for ex­am­ple in train­ing and de­vel­op­ment; in pri­vate sec­tor de­vel­op­ment such as small busi­ness­es so that peo­ple who are in­ter­est­ed in start­ing lit­tle busi­ness­es can do so and not de­pend on gov­ern­ment for a job in the pub­lic ser­vice–be­cause that doesn't ex­ist right now.