I don’t think the Min­is­ter of Fi­nance should treat the mid-year re­view as just a re­al­lo­ca­tion ex­er­cise for this fis­cal year. He has to do that, of course, but I think the Gov­ern­ment as a whole should be think­ing about get­ting through this 2026 fis­cal year with­out cri­sis. They should al­so be think­ing hard of fis­cal 2027 and 2028 be­cause, as our Gov­ern­ment, they need to pre­pare the ground to op­ti­mise the wind­fall in nat­ur­al gas an­tic­i­pat­ed in 2028.

The na­ture of prepa­ra­tion be­fore the wind­fall is as im­por­tant as the an­tic­i­pat­ed wind­fall, it­self.

One can see signs of ac­tion - for in­stance, the sod turn­ing for a ho­tel in south, the roll-out of Ver­i­fy TT fo­cused on dig­i­tal ac­cess and shar­ing of aca­d­e­m­ic cre­den­tials, civ­il and le­gal doc­u­ments etc. These are steps in the right di­rec­tion.

The World Bank, in its April 2026 Macro Pover­ty Out­look, projects an op­ti­mistic 3.2% growth in 2027 based on up­stream en­er­gy and a Man­a­tee-pro­pelled boost. So, it an­tic­i­pates en­er­gy growth be­fore 2028. But, if Gov­ern­ment fo­cus­es on mak­ing fis­cal 2026 bet­ter, and on prepar­ing the ground well in fis­cal 2027 and 2028, I think they will be on course to build­ing a sol­id plat­form.

When the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress Gov­ern­ment (UNC) took of­fice in April 2025, they had no fis­cal space. They had three op­tions: add to the bor­row­ing; draw down on the Her­itage Sta­bil­i­sa­tion Fund; raise tax­es. And they had to en­gage in short-term bor­row­ing, as well as call in en­er­gy tax­es, to pay May and June salaries to pub­lic ser­vants. But the re­al­i­ty is that af­ter a year of ef­fort and eight months in­to the 2026 bud­get, the non-en­er­gy sec­tor has not been able to get off the ground, ac­cord­ing to the lat­est Cen­tral Bank re­port. Even if you take an 18% GDP drop in the decade be­fore the UNC, the ab­sence of buoy­an­cy in the non-en­er­gy sec­tor now is still wor­ri­some.

T&T is faced with in­creas­ing debt and in­creased debt re­pay­ment oblig­a­tions, high­er in­fla­tion, in­creased ex­pen­di­ture. It is easy to spend the wind­fall be­fore it ar­rives if the econ­o­my is stag­nant.

The sum­ma­ry as­sess­ment of the Cen­tral Bank, though, is that the en­er­gy buffer we have keeps the floor from col­laps­ing but there is no ex­ist­ing pri­vate sec­tor en­gine that can cause the econ­o­my to grow. When en­er­gy fails, there is no growth ca­pac­i­ty struc­tured in the econ­o­my. If we con­tin­ue with the econ­o­my struc­tured in the same way when the boom comes, re­source and de­ploy­ment re­al­lo­ca­tion will sim­ply per­pet­u­ate the boom and bust cy­cle, ce­ment the un­der­de­vel­op­ment process and en­sure that T&T will con­tin­ue to be stuck in the mid­dle-in­come coun­try trap.

What is the al­ter­na­tive but to break the cy­cle now? And Gov­ern­ment must do it with­in the time­frame of 18 to 24 months. It is un­fair to them, and, it isa tough task but it has to be done. Can this Gov­ern­ment break the boom and bust cy­cle by tak­ing ac­tion in the next 18 to 24 months? I think they can if they put their mind to the task at hand, even as they con­tain gangs and sub­due crim­i­nals.

The World Bank says that struc­tur­al re­forms now are the fun­da­men­tal build­ing blocks and the es­sen­tial foun­da­tion re­quired to give fund­ing from the en­er­gy wind­fall a mul­ti­pli­er ef­fect when it ar­rives. The World Bank makes it clear that with­out that nec­es­sary foun­da­tion, Trinidad and To­ba­go will be trapped in an­oth­er hope­less cy­cle of what they call “com­mod­i­ty-de­pen­dent vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty.”

One an­swer is non-en­er­gy di­ver­si­fied in­vest­ment for ex­port earn­ings growth. We have known that for years, we did not do it well. We must get it done now. Agri­cul­ture. Tourism. Man­u­fac­tur­ing. Green en­er­gy. Cre­ative in­dus­tries.

An­oth­er is to de­ploy the Dig­i­tal Stack, which In­dia is pro­vid­ing to us, to achieve three key things - in­di­vid­ual iden­ti­ty em­bed­ded in your phone; easy move­ment of mon­ey via tech­nol­o­gy, and in­for­ma­tion about things like health or fi­nan­cial ca­pac­i­ty which you can ac­cess and move to wher­ev­er you need to send it. These will make a big dif­fer­ence to cit­i­zen con­ve­nience and to ef­fi­cien­cies in rev­enue col­lec­tion and the ef­fec­tive­ness of ser­vices.

The non-en­er­gy rev­enue side can­not be ig­nored ei­ther. Tech­nol­o­gy must be de­ployed to bring the in­for­mal sec­tor in as tax­pay­ers. And at the port and through cus­toms, tech­nol­o­gy must re­duce cor­rup­tion and boost rev­enue.

How long will it take to con­nect 1.4 mil­lion peo­ple in a coun­try with 84% In­ter­net pen­e­tra­tion with a high-lev­el Dig­i­tal Stack Re­ceiv­er in cit­i­zens’ pock­ets? Nine­ty per cent of the mo­bile phones are Sam­sung or Ap­ple. It can be done.