This Government, like all the governments before it, takes the view that it was elected to govern, via a mechanism called Cabinet, and so it will govern in accordance with only its wits. Seized of this perspective, it expects the electorate to follow it by supporting the initiatives that it comes up with. It even expects the Opposition to assist it legislatively with the solutions it has thought up. By the electoral result of a majority vote, however mere, it thinks it is entitled to our compliance.
The Privy Council recently had to lecture it on the need to change its perspective on the authority to lengthen the term of office of councillors and aldermen in the municipal corporations, explaining that that authority belonged not to Cabinet but to the electorate. And even then—so baked into its political DNA is the winner-entitled-to-all perspective—it sought to challenge the Council by grand-charging that it would seek legal advice on the ruling. It was so hard to eat humble pie.
In the 2023-24 Budget, the perspective fairly leaps at us. It cuts Tobago’s customary development funding from $300 million to $260 million, and the only explanation we are given is that he was guided by the assurance of the Chief Secretary that the Tobago economy was recovering and, without doing his own checks, he keeps quiet about specific proposals to address the island’s emergence from an actual collapse of its economy in 2022.
It raises the minimum wage by $480 per month, pushing the beneficiary families out of poverty (the World Bank definition of poor as living on US$2 per day). It makes a one-time grant of $4,000 to certain retirees. And it offers a grant of $1,000 to struggling households to help out with textbooks and other materials. But he does not tell us how he arrived at these figures.
In relation to the textbook grant, he does not provide us with the typical supplemental cost of education (including books) for the child, given “free” tuition, school meals, transport, and the like. Indeed, he does not take the trouble of showing us how these provisions are necessitated by the state of the economy and how they will push up the quality of life of the beneficiaries.
Let’s pause a bit and reflect on these acts. They will doubtless bring some degree of relief to the recipients, but how were the sums calculated? Why didn’t the Finance Minister tell us, for instance, what it would cost a household mired in poverty or emerging from it to acquire all the materials needed for the children’s schooling? Relatedly, why did he go partway? Don’t the children of poor households need quality education just as their peers from more fortunate households? Just as the Government decided to give a $1,000 grant, couldn’t it have given $2,000 or $3,000?
After all, they act as if they are pulling amounts out of a hat, and they certainly have the power to act that way. Which brings me to the matter of the low productivity growth and the low GDP per capita of the economy vis-à-vis the goal of ‘developed country status’ by 2030.
It appears that, if we are to reach that kind of status by 2030, we need to have a GDP per capita greater than US$50,000 (using global data as of 2019). The Government is relying on the ability of the non-energy sector to drive the diversification agenda, but the current progress to the target is too slow. Real GDP per capita is US$16,500, which is 67 per cent below the target and the trend annual growth since Independence is two per cent. Even if the real GDP per capita grows at trend, it would be at $18,953 by 2030, some 64 per cent below the mark. If the starting point is assumed to be $18,500 in 2025, growth at trend would yield about $20,000 by 2030, some 60 per cent below the mark. If the 2.7 per cent growth rate can be sustained, it would yield about $21,000 by 2030. Growth at the six per cent rate required to achieve debt sustainability would yield about $25,000 by 2030, half the way to the target, which in the rich countries is rising.
Unless the Government has abandoned Vision 2030, it needs to change its style of budgeting and become far more inclusive. Institutional progress (enhancements and policymaking) is targeted. But there is no reference to the most important institution of all—the governance framework and constitution reform needed to put an end to under-informed authoritarian and autocratic government in both Tobago and Trinidad and upgrade the quality of policymaking that is vital to sound diversification programming and export development.
If we want to acquire developed country status, the people in their communities have to be brought into the budgetary process. But for that to happen, the Government has to let go of its autocratic approach to managing the economy and governing the country.
We need to end the stasis.
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 has also written thousands of columns for all the major newspapers in the country. He can be reached at jaywinster@gmail.com
