I hy­poth­e­sise that, in or­der to pro­mote de­vel­op­ment in To­ba­go, poli­cies must be de­signed to fos­ter faster growth in To­ba­go than in Trinidad. And the big ques­tion is: How to bring that about?

Ob­vi­ous­ly, it would be great if such poli­cies could be culled from ideas gath­ered from spe­cial po­lit­i­cal stake­hold­ers and so­cial de­vel­op­ment thinkers.

But in the ab­sence of such a process, the coun­try will have to make do with the ideas of those who have been writ­ing about de­vel­op­ment in the whole coun­try, but in To­ba­go in par­tic­u­lar.

The coun­try knows that To­ba­go bad­ly needs to ex­pand and deep­en its pri­vate sec­tor and in­dus­tri­alise its tourism plat­form.

So the fo­cus of such poli­cies should be, ac­cord­ing to Vanus and his col­lab­o­ra­tors (Dr Car­los Hazel and Ken­neth Bis­soon), to i) in­tro­duce a tar­get­ed pro­gramme to build To­ba­go’s pri­vate sec­tor and dis­place the THA as the is­land’s main em­ploy­er and ii) op­ti­mise the use of the is­land’s tourism plat­form to pro­duce and ex­port cap­i­tal ser­vices, un­der­pinned by a sig­nif­i­cant in­flow of for­eign in­vestors/en­tre­pre­neurs and their lev­el 3 and 4 work­ers (as de­ter­mined by the ILO).

But it should be not­ed that the tourism pro­gramme should be scaled to at­tract an ever-grow­ing num­ber of in­ter­na­tion­al vis­i­tors an­nu­al­ly, with a tar­get of 100,000 in the medi­um term.

There are sev­er­al sup­port­ing el­e­ments of such a pro­gramme, one of which is heavy col­lab­o­ra­tion be­tween the Gov­ern­ment in To­ba­go and the Gov­ern­ment in Trinidad, but the one I shall be fo­cused on here is an up­grade of the pol­i­cy-mak­ing ca­pac­i­ty of the gov­ern­ment in To­ba­go via the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly (THA).

Three ex­pres­sions of this up­grade are (i) an Ex­ec­u­tive Coun­cil that is a very small mi­nor­i­ty of THA; (ii) leg­isla­tive over­sight of the Ex­ec­u­tive Coun­cil and lo­cal law-mak­ing by a suf­fi­cient ma­jor­i­ty of elect­ed As­sem­bly rep­re­sen­ta­tives large enough to run the over­sight com­mit­tees and com­plete with man­dates to en­sure ef­fec­tive pub­lic pe­ti­tion­ing of the leg­is­la­ture by all rel­e­vant stake­hold­ers, in­clud­ing those in the di­as­po­ra and oth­er for­eign stake­hold­ers; (iii) in­tro­duc­tion of an elect­ed To­ba­go Sen­ate for the pri­ma­ry pur­pose of en­sur­ing spa­tial eq­ui­ty in de­vel­op­ment across To­ba­go, but with re­spon­si­bil­i­ties to share leg­isla­tive law-mak­ing and over­sight of the Ex­ec­u­tive Coun­cil, and ad­vise and con­sent on the scale and struc­ture of the To­ba­go De­vel­op­ment Bud­get.

Such re­forms would en­able full-in­for­ma­tion pol­i­cy­mak­ing rather than the lim­it­ed in­for­ma­tion prac­tices of the cur­rent de­sign.

In brief, a very small Ex­ec­u­tive Coun­cil; a large ma­jor­i­ty of elect­ed as­sem­bly­men who would pro­vide leg­isla­tive over­sight of the small Ex­ec­u­tive Coun­cil; and an elect­ed Sen­ate.

Vanus et al and I haven’t quite worked out the rel­a­tive num­bers, so for now I am talk­ing in pro­por­tion­ate terms.

It does not help To­ba­go’s cause to have an Ex­ec­u­tive that is a law un­to it­self—an Ex­ec­u­tive com­pris­ing every elect­ed and ap­point­ed mem­ber on the Gov­ern­ment’s side.

For bet­ter gov­ern­ment than what ob­tains now, we can no longer af­ford to wait un­til gen­er­al elec­tion time, or for week­ly press con­fer­ences, for the Ex­ec­u­tive to give ac­count.

In­ter­nal ac­count­abil­i­ty must be built in­to the gov­er­nance process. Which is to say, a big­ger body of elect­ed as­sem­bly­men must over­see what the Ex­ec­u­tive Coun­cil is do­ing.

As a mat­ter of course.

And a Sen­ate would help in a spe­cial, un­prece­dent­ed way. It wouldn’t work like our na­tion­al Sen­ate which is com­posed of 31 ap­point­ed mem­bers, with the Gov­ern­ment hav­ing a built-in ma­jor­i­ty of 16, the Op­po­si­tion 6, and the In­de­pen­dents 9.

The na­tion­al Sen­ate is based on the Gov­ern­ment hav­ing an ad­van­tage for the pas­sage of its laws. It is not based on the no­tion of eq­ui­ty. But the To­ba­go Sen­ate as pro­posed is.

As I sug­gest­ed above, it would prin­ci­pal­ly pro­vide spa­tial eq­ui­ty in de­vel­op­ment across To­ba­go and, fur­ther, it would share over­sight of the Ex­ec­u­tive Coun­cil and ad­vise on the scale and struc­ture of the De­vel­op­ment Bud­get.

In our po­lit­i­cal space, this is rev­o­lu­tion­ary; I know. We still need to firm up the num­bers game and set­tle the bound­aries of dif­fer­ent groups in the House.

But there can be no doubt that To­ba­go has to take a po­si­tion on these and like mat­ters and that there must be co­op­er­a­tion be­tween the na­tion­al Gov­ern­ment and To­ba­go Gov­ern­ment for this de­vel­op­ment agen­da to be re­alised.

This per­spec­tive on To­bag­on­ian de­vel­op­ment needs wide­spread pub­lic dis­cus­sion.

And, while we go about this, we might want to con­sid­er whether there isn’t mer­it in the idea of equal­is­ing the num­ber of seats in the na­tion­al Sen­ate be­tween To­ba­go and Trinidad as one way of achiev­ing equal­i­ty of sta­tus for both is­lands. 

Win­ford James is a re­tired UWI lec­tur­er who has been analysing is­sues in ed­u­ca­tion, lan­guage, de­vel­op­ment, and pol­i­tics in Trinidad and To­ba­go and the wider Caribbean on ra­dio and TV since the 1970s. He al­so has writ­ten thou­sands of columns for all the ma­jor news­pa­pers in the coun­try. He can be reached at jay­win­ster@gmail.com