A friend of mine who was once a part of gov­ern­ment of T&T told me re­cent­ly that when an ad­min­is­tra­tion wants to do some­thing it can get it done in a mat­ter of weeks, but when it is forced to act and does not want to, it of­ten sets up a com­mit­tee.

As I thought about this it made per­fect sense why there are so many re­ports that get done and sit idly while as a coun­try we are di­min­ished for not act­ing up­on them.

In fact, our fail­ure to take the req­ui­site ac­tion then leads to a deep­en­ing of the prob­lem and an­oth­er com­mit­tee set up to look at the wors­en­ing prob­lem. In oth­er words, a self con­trived and fa­cil­i­tat­ed cri­sis of paral­y­sis.

In 2015 when the Kei­th Row­ley ad­min­is­tra­tion took of­fice it was dealt a bad hand. It had come to pow­er on the backs of a high spend­ing UNC ad­min­is­tra­tion that had sad­dled the coun­try with large bud­gets, built on strong en­er­gy prices and in­creased debt.

The coun­try had be­come ac­cus­tomed to in­creased trans­fers and sub­si­dies that start­ed un­der the Man­ning regime as the mon­ey from At­lantic LNG, larg­er gas pro­duc­tion and petro­chem­i­cals masked the in­ef­fi­cien­cies in the so­ci­ety and econ­o­my and al­lowed the lux­u­ries of pro­grammes like CEPEP.

Row­ley came in a year af­ter crude prices start­ed on what now seems like its per­ma­nent de­cline in val­ue and when the failed bid rounds and lim­it­ed ex­plo­ration suc­cess was be­gin­ning to im­pact not on­ly the amount of gas avail­able but the mar­gins that the up­stream com­pa­nies were re­port­ing to their share­hold­ers. So yes let’s ac­cept that the gov­ern­ment was dealt a bad hand.

Re­al­is­ing the chal­lenge, well at least we thought so, Dr Row­ley brought to­geth­er some of the coun­try’s best eco­nom­ic minds led by Dr Ter­rence Far­rell to look at T&T’s chal­lenges and de­vel­op plans on how we can have a sus­tain­able econ­o­my.

The Eco­nom­ic De­vel­op­ment Board worked dili­gent­ly and made sev­er­al rec­om­men­da­tions to the gov­ern­ment, need­less to say that af­ter it was clear the gov­ern­ment had no in­ter­est in mean­ing­ful change and the Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert would not im­ple­ment their mea­sures they re­signed and the Row­ley ad­min­is­tra­tion nei­ther im­ple­ment­ed the rec­om­men­da­tions nor even al­lowed it to be de­bat­ed and ven­ti­lat­ed in the pub­lic square.

You see this kind of be­hav­iour is on­ly pos­si­ble in a coun­try that sees democ­ra­cy lim­it­ed to the bal­lot box and an ad­min­is­tra­tion and rul­ing par­ty in which the old adage that “not a dog must bark” is alive and well. So Robert Le Hunte dis­agrees stren­u­ous­ly with the Prime Min­is­ter on pol­i­cy, he sud­den­ly moves from be­ing a high­ly sought af­ter min­is­ter to one that is not good enough to be a can­di­date in a con­stituen­cy that he clear­ly had sig­nif­i­cant sup­port.

Five years af­ter be­ing dealt a bad hand the Row­ley ad­min­is­tra­tion still has not ar­tic­u­lat­ed a strat­e­gy to take the coun­try for­ward. For a year there was a great deal of in­ter­est in tourism, all the talk was about the San­dals and Beach­es ho­tels that were to be con­struct­ed in To­ba­go. The charge was led by the man from Ma­son Hall and when that failed he ap­peared to have walked away, as if to say if there is no San­dals then this chal­lenge is ei­ther too much for me or be­neath men.

Five years passed and all the num­bers went in the wrong di­rec­tion. At the end of 2015 the coun­try had US $9.3 bil­lion in re­serves in the Cen­tral Bank that came down to US $6.9 bil­lion at the end of last year.

Debt to GDP was 50 per cent it is now 71.1 per cent ac­cord­ing to the Cen­tral Bank. Gov­ern­ment rev­enue moved from $56 bil­lion to $45 bil­lion. In oth­er words noth­ing the gov­ern­ment has done should give us con­fi­dence that they will steer us out of what is a wors­en­ing eco­nom­ic sit­u­a­tion.

Then came 2020 and the COVID-19 chal­lenge.

Al­ready faced with a weak­ened econ­o­my, T&T is now deal­ing with a cri­sis, the likes of which the world has not seen.

The gov­ern­ment ap­peared to ini­tial­ly han­dle the health chal­lenge well. It com­mu­ni­cat­ed with the pop­u­la­tion, got buy in, worked with the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty and progress ap­peared to be made. I wrote in this very space that if the gov­ern­ment con­tin­ued to en­gage the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty and coun­try it will auger well for the fu­ture.

It did not ap­pear to last very long. An­oth­er com­mit­tee was again formed. The roadmap to re­cov­ery com­mit­tee. Again some of the na­tion’s best minds were brought to­geth­er. Again the Row­ley ad­min­is­tra­tion got peo­ple to serve their coun­try and from all we see again it is like­ly that their rec­om­men­da­tions will be left on the pa­per they were writ­ten.

This brings me to the spot­light on the econ­o­my that the gov­ern­ment will have next week. This time the coun­try is be­ing in­vit­ed to sit in their liv­ing room and look at TTT, an­oth­er loss mak­ing state en­ter­prise, as the gov­ern­ment tells us once again that it has been dealt a bad hand.

For five years it be­moaned the bad hand it had been dealt and the prof­li­gate spend­ing of the UNC and did not rise to the chal­lenge of chart­ing a new eco­nom­ic course for the coun­try. Now we are go­ing to once again be told of the chal­leng­ing cir­cum­stances as the gov­ern­ment tries to buy time.

This spot­light in the econ­o­my, we are told, is not dis­sim­i­lar to the spot­light on en­er­gy in which the coun­try looked at the state of the sec­tor.

Well if we are to judge by the suc­cess of the spot­light on en­er­gy and ex­pect sim­i­lar suc­cess in the econ­o­my then we are in for even more dif­fi­cult times.

Since the spot­light on en­er­gy what has hap­pened?

Nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­tion has failed to re­cov­er to the 4.1 bil­lion cu­bic feet per day that the Row­ley ad­min­is­tra­tion met in 2015 even though both Mr Im­bert and En­er­gy Min­is­ter Franklin Khan tried to fudge the num­bers in the last bud­get.

Since the spot­light on En­er­gy Dr Row­ley et al made their fa­mous Hous­ton trip and fol­low­ing that we had high­er gas prices that has now led to sev­er­al plants on the Point Lisas In­dus­tri­al Es­tate shut­ting down.

Since the spot­light on en­er­gy crude pro­duc­tion has not im­proved, in fact it has con­tin­ued to fall and the coun­try has seen the clo­sure of the Point a Pierre re­fin­ery.

Since the spot­light on en­er­gy the coun­try has had an­oth­er failed near-shore bid round and no deep wa­ter bid rounds.

What we need is a spot­light on per­for­mance. We need a spot­light on a strat­e­gy. We need a spot­light on ef­fi­cien­cy and we need a spot­light on gov­ern­ment per­for­mance.