To­day brings to an end one of the most chal­leng­ing years Trinidad and To­ba­go has ever ex­pe­ri­enced, one that many would like to for­get.

2020 will be re­mem­bered for the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic and the 126 cit­i­zens who died as a re­sult of the virus.

We have al­so seen the un­for­tu­nate spec­tre of na­tion­als of this coun­try beg­ging their Gov­ern­ment to al­low them to come home.

Tens of thou­sands of na­tion­als have ei­ther lost their jobs or seen a re­duc­tion in days of work or pay. It has been a hard year.

On a na­tion­al scale, the coun­try’s econ­o­my is ex­pect­ed to have shrunk by dou­ble dig­its, it has run its largest deficit in his­to­ry and was forced to draw down sig­nif­i­cant sums from the Her­itage and Sta­bil­i­sa­tion Fund.

T&T’s debt to GDP ra­tio has now crossed 80 per cent and the Min­is­ter of Fi­nance has warned that next year will be tough with more pres­sure for for­eign ex­change and low­er gov­ern­ment rev­enue.

When you add to that the chal­lenge of Venezue­lan mi­gra­tion and what ap­pears at best a dis­joint­ed pol­i­cy, it is un­der­stand­able that many would wish the year good­bye.

With the ush­er­ing in of a new year, there are at least two groups of peo­ple who are like­ly very wor­ried - those em­ployed in the hos­pi­tal­i­ty and en­ter­tain­ment sec­tors and those liv­ing in south-east Trinidad.

In the case of those in hos­pi­tal­i­ty and par­tic­u­lar­ly in the ho­tel and tourism sec­tor, there is no end in sight to the clo­sure of the bor­ders. Gov­ern­ment has ar­gued that this mea­sure is to keep T&T safe but does not say how this coun­try dif­fers from the rest of the re­gion in keep­ing its cit­i­zens safe from COVID-19.

Bar­ba­dos has long opened its bor­ders and up un­til yes­ter­day, had 371 cas­es with sev­en deaths. St Lu­cia has 331 cas­es with five deaths and Ja­maica, which has twice the size of this coun­try’s pop­u­la­tion, has 298 deaths. In oth­er words, the Gov­ern­ment can point to no Caribbean coun­try in which the open­ing of their bor­ders has led to mass in­fec­tion or the over­run­ning of their health care sys­tems and deaths.

It is thus high time the Gov­ern­ment puts in place the re­quired safe­ty mea­sures and re­open T&T’s bor­ders. Pun­ish­ing na­tion­als and favour­ing oth­ers on­ly re­duce con­fi­dence in our in­sti­tu­tions.

For cit­i­zens in south-east Trinidad, they have had a pub­lic ser­vice cut off from them. PTSC has an­nounced that it has stopped the bus ser­vice from San Fer­nan­do to Ma­yaro/Guayagua­yare be­cause of the poor state of the road­way in that part of the coun­try.

This is par­tic­u­lar­ly vex­ing, as this is the area that gives so much to this coun­try’s well-be­ing. Every day, al­most two bil­lion stan­dard cu­bic feet of nat­ur­al gas and 15,000 bar­rels of oil come from there and yet their roads are de­plorable. They have among the high­est lev­els of pover­ty in the coun­try and if there was ever a case of rur­al ne­glect, this is the poster child.

This year might be com­ing to an end there­fore but the prob­lems have on­ly just be­gun.