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Tuesday, July 15, 2025

Mitchell’s Math & Mottley’s Money Matters

by

1790 days ago
20200820

I am sure we all cel­e­brat­ed the news when we heard some time ago that Grena­da’s Kei­th Mitchell was vot­ed the top Fi­nance Min­is­ter in the Caribbean and then again when just last week it was an­nounced that Bar­ba­dos PM Mia Mot­t­ley was ap­point­ed to chair two fi­nan­cial com­mit­tees of the World Bank and the IMF re­spec­tive­ly, it was again a time for our chau­vin­is­tic cups to be filled and be­come over­flow­ing with re­gion­al pride, that an­oth­er one of our own had at­tained in­ter­na­tion­al tran­scen­dence in the field of eco­nom­ics and fi­nance.

When Mitchell took over the Min­istry of Fi­nance port­fo­lio in his is­land the debt ra­tio was 104% to the coun­try’s GDP and in just cou­ple years of his cre­ativ­i­ty he re­duced it to an as­tound­ing 53%, ex­plain­ing why he was re­gard­ed the top fi­nance min­is­ter in the Caribbean.

Here’s Mitchell’ mag­ic: While the bo­gey­man in T&T is the om­nipresent Tax-man, pick­ing the pock­ets of its cit­i­zens for every cent it needs, Mitchell re­moved the per­son­al in­come tax which trig­gered a con­struc­tion boom and an im­pres­sive growth rate and be­com­ing brand­ed as the OECS eco­nom­ic tiger, a com­par­i­son to the eco­nom­ic gains of Sin­ga­pore.

Via imag­i­na­tive eco­nom­ic poli­cies and plan­ning, small is­lands like Grena­da, An­guil­la, the Cay­man Is­lands etc. con­tin­ue to grow and de­vel­op eco­nom­i­cal­ly al­though bereft of nat­ur­al re­sources, al­though poor by com­par­i­son with oil rich T&T which has run this econ­o­my not on the nat­ur­al wealth it pos­sess­es but on the spite, vin­dic­tive­ness and the un­der­qual­i­fied staffing of the po­lit­i­cal di­rec­torate.

Kei­th Mitchell has a doc­tor­ate in Math­e­mat­ics and Mot­t­ley stud­ied at the pres­ti­gious Lon­don school of Eco­nom­ics, so if you think it all hap­pened for them by luck or the grace of god, think again; re­alise that a lot of brain­pow­er that Bar­ba­dos and Grena­da use more than com­pen­sate for the nat­ur­al re­sources they lack. It is all about do­ing the best with what you have and en­sur­ing that it works, that in both their cas­es, Mot­t­ley and Mitchell won all their seats in the gen­er­al elec­tion in their coun­try, prov­ing that the rank and file across their coun­try were sat­is­fied with the equal dis­pen­sa­tion of re­sources to them and none felt dis­crim­i­nat­ed against.

In­stead of tak­ing a leaf from the book of eco­nom­ic man­age­ment from Grena­da and Bar­ba­dos, our new­ly re­elect­ed PM of T&T in his fore­cast of doom and gloom, promis­es this coun­try an­oth­er two years of fi­nan­cial hard­ship which when added to the pre­vi­ous five years to­tal sev­en con­sec­u­tive years of hell on earth for T&T.

With the kind of OJT-type in­com­pe­tence in con­trol of our coun­try’s fi­nances, would any­body from here reach the heights of Mitchell and Mot­t­ley? The PNM has run this coun­try from 1956 to now and at no time did they see their job as a busi­ness you un­der­take to make mon­ey, to take a par­lor and make it grow in­to a su­per­mar­ket in­to a cor­po­ra­tion, but Like Man­ley of Ja­maica said, mon­ey to us was like a dose of Ep­som salt which we eject­ed faster than we ab­sorbed it; which Williams said was no prob­lem and so like Es­co­bar gave it away to whomev­er came cap in hand to him so that they could re­fine their in­fra­struc­ture, roads, wa­ter to first world stan­dard while ours re­main third world.

Pol­i­tics is sup­posed to evolved in­to a form of en­tre­pre­neur­ial busi­ness, so that when lead­ers see mon­ey they use it to make more with it in the same way Se­hwag says in crick­et, see ball, hit ball. Here we say, see mon­ey, full pock­et. The man­ag­ing of our mon­ey has to evolve from the easy come, easy go psy­chol­o­gy to the stor­age con­cept psy­chol­o­gy of save for the rainy day; there are peo­ple who un­der­stand this con­cept and when we are choos­ing our Fi­nance Min­is­ter it’s that per­son we need to ap­point. It’s Kei­th Mitchell we need to vote for.

All in favour of Mitchell, say Aye.

Aye!!!

L. Sid­dhartha Orie

VIA EMAIL


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