Kali­fa Clyne

Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley said last night de­spite grim out­look for rev­enue from the oil and gas sec­tor, more than $113 mil­lion will be spent to buy new spy tools for the po­lice ser­vice.It was one of the few an­nounce­ments of ex­pen­di­ture, in an ad­dress which fo­cused on new rev­enue gen­er­at­ing projects and in­ter­na­tion­al and re­gion­al en­er­gy part­ner­ships.

Dur­ing his 37-min­utes ad­dress Row­ley said the gov­ern­ment be­lieved that with prop­er man­age­ment sys­tems and a "can do" at­ti­tude that po­lice of­fi­cers had it with­in them to get the job done.The coun­try mur­der rate has gal­loped to 319, with the ma­jor­i­ty of crimes un­solved.

Row­ley has faced much crit­i­cism from cit­i­zens for not get­ting a han­dle on crime and he re­cent­ly sum­moned the di­vi­sion­al heads of the po­lice ser­vice to do more.In an im­me­di­ate re­sponse to Row­ley ad­dress, re­tired oil sec­tor em­ploy­ee Em­manuel Brown said he was not im­pressed with Row­ley's an­nounce­ments.

The fa­ther of three and grand­fa­ther of two, felt the Prime Min­is­ter had ne­glect­ed health, agri­cul­ture, crime and hous­ing.

"I would like to see a gov­ern­ment do and not say. Noth­ing was men­tioned about di­ver­si­fy­ing the econ­o­my through agri­cul­ture. He made no men­tion of our wors­en­ing health care sys­tem," Brown said.

"What Row­ley spoke about with the en­er­gy sec­tor would not hap­pen overnight. This was just a pre­cur­sor to the bud­get," he said.

Brown said the coun­try want­ed to know when the homi­cide rates would start go­ing down and the de­tec­tion rate would im­prove.

"We need to know how they are go­ing to treat with crime which was not men­tioned."

Brown al­so crit­i­cised the length of time it would take for projects to be im­ple­ment­ed.Re­fer­ring to the mul­ti-mil­lion dol­lar ho­tel project by Gor­don "Butch" Stew­art to de­vel­op a San­dals re­sort on No Man's Land, off To­ba­go, Brown was not too thrilled.

"San­dals will take very long to un­fold at least three years to get off the ground by then, if they don't nip crime in the bud those rooms will re­main emp­ty be­cause we will lose in­vestor con­fi­dence and tourist ar­rivals in To­ba­go."

De­spite his reser­va­tions about the con­tents of the ad­dress, he ap­plaud­ed Row­ley's de­ci­sion to com­mu­ni­cate with the coun­try.

"It was not a bad put to­geth­er ad­dress. Row­ley has to com­mu­ni­cate with pop­u­la­tion more fre­quent­ly."

While Row­ley last night urged the pop­u­la­tion that they had "a gold­en op­por­tu­ni­ty" to cap­i­talise on the gov­ern­ment's con­fi­dence and abil­i­ty, he si­mul­ta­ne­ous­ly warned of a need to fur­ther tight­en their belts.The ad­dress comes ahead of the Bud­get for fis­cal 2016-2017 which is ex­pect­ed to be pre­sent­ed in Par­lia­ment by month's end.

Oth­er ob­servers found that the sting will come in the tail of the bud­get and Row­ley was just soft­en­ing the blow.Row­ley paint­ed a pic­ture of an econ­o­my that had slowed down due to low en­er­gy prices.

"For the last ten years we have been sit­ting on a cri­sis in the oil pro­duc­tion side and we have al­lowed it to es­cape us large­ly be­cause the sit­u­a­tion has been masked by rel­a­tive­ly strong rev­enue stream bol­stered large­ly by favourable prices. The sit­u­a­tion can no longer es­cape our at­ten­tion and sus­tained low­er prices now and in­to the medi­um term should be a mat­ter of great con­cern to all of us.

"It al­so means that our chal­lenges to­day can­not be wished away by sim­ply wait­ing on the oil God, who is sup­posed to be a Tri­ni, to step in and save us," he said.