Fol­low­ing Don­ald Trump’s sharply es­ca­lat­ing crack­down on mi­gra­tion “from all Third World Coun­tries,” I couldn’t help but re­vis­it Trinidad’s sta­tus, which in­evitably proved to be de­bil­i­tat­ing con­sid­er­ing our 63 years of pain, strug­gles and suf­fer­ing of its cit­i­zens, many just get­ting by with the crumbs thrown at them.

Is Trump al­so view­ing Trinidad as a s***h*** coun­try? Like aban­don­ment, af­ter the elec­tion is won, why have our lead­ers failed their cit­i­zens and dis­ap­point­ed their vot­ers? Why have our lead­ers not de­vel­oped our coun­try be­yond wait­ing for ris­ing pe­tro­le­um prices? While every coun­try has its own prob­lems, and while we may es­cape third-world sta­tus, we can­not even wal­low in any mean­ing­ful con­so­la­tion of be­ing “De­vel­op­ing”.

A 58-year-old cit­i­zen was re­cent­ly killed while nav­i­gat­ing an­oth­er mas­sive pot­hole, which forced him in­to on­com­ing traf­fic, end­ing his life. Af­ter 63 years of in­de­pen­dence? Re­al­ly? Yet, the road­ways built by the Amer­i­cans in Waller­field and Cha­gara­mus are still stand­ing over 65 years lat­er, while our en­tire land­scape is rid­dled with pot­holes and de­struc­tive humps. How fool­ish it is to see new humps be­ing in­stalled with ma­te­ri­als, and pot­holes ig­nored. All of this mag­ni­tude of bad man­age­ment speaks vol­umes to qual­i­fy Trinidad for s***h*** and third-world sta­tus should Trump ever get an­gry at our lead­ers.

What does our qual­i­ty of life mean when our per capi­ta in­come is high­er than most of our neigh­bour­ing coun­tries, and our cit­i­zens can’t ac­cess a mere US$100, most times de­nied the abil­i­ty to be fi­nan­cial­ly in­de­pen­dent? Do our politi­cians and lit­tle bankers know the val­ue of the pow­er­ful mul­ti­pli­er ef­fects? Lawrence Duprey was quot­ed as say­ing, “Caribbean lead­ers have not lift­ed their cit­i­zens out of the squalor of pover­ty”. No won­der a for­mer prime min­is­ter ex­pressed his sen­ti­ments, stat­ing, “the poor must sup­port the rich”.

Af­ter 63 years of in­de­pen­dence, Trinidad is still a red tape na­tion painstak­ing­ly mired in colo­nial bu­reau­cra­cy, like the fool­ish laws de­bar­ring cit­i­zens from en­ter­ing gov­ern­ment of­fices wear­ing cloth­ing show­ing their legs, arm­less cloth­ing, etc., in a very trop­i­cal coun­try, while the en­tire world adored Michelle Oba­ma, who brought a breath of fresh, fash­ion­able arm­less air to an oth­er­wise sto­ic White House. While the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment ad­min­is­tra­tion was forced to can­cel that vi­sion­less re­quire­ment, I was shocked last week to en­counter our Cus­toms still fool­ish­ly hold­ing on tight­ly to its stan­dard colo­nial deco­rum. We con­tin­ue to have an ex­treme­ly poor work eth­ic, en­coun­ter­ing many peo­ple with mean­ing­less ti­tles, while the very em­ploy­ees who would prof­fer ter­ri­ble ser­vice to cus­tomers in ex­change for a salary would stand up for their con­sumer rights else­where.

As an­gry as we are about un­abat­ing crime, we al­so have to un­hesi­tat­ing­ly ac­knowl­edge that, at best, many crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ties em­anat­ed from our poor­ly de­vel­oped sta­tus, more so of gov­ern­ments not pro­vid­ing enough projects and eco­nom­ic stim­u­lus for cer­tain seg­ments of valu­able cit­i­zens. While the last ad­min­is­tra­tion didn’t have a clue how to ap­pre­hend crime and give bat­tered cit­i­zens a sense of care for their well-be­ing, ig­nor­ing their piv­otal con­tri­bu­tions to the econ­o­my.

While Trinidad is a petro­chem­i­cal-based econ­o­my, as re­flect­ed by the glob­al up­swing-down­swing spi­ral of the econ­o­my, there was no vi­sion and in­evitably no de­sire what­so­ev­er to di­ver­si­fy the econ­o­my, if on­ly to elim­i­nate un­em­ploy­ment, cre­ate more en­tre­pre­neurs, and re­duce crime. I ap­plaud our present ad­min­is­tra­tion for hav­ing vi­sion, es­pous­ing sen­ti­ments to the ef­fect that while they have in­suf­fi­cient cap­i­tal for an­tic­i­pat­ed projects, they adopt­ed a pos­i­tive at­ti­tude to send a team of their min­is­ters to Dubai and Sau­di Ara­bia to seek fund­ing. But Sin­ga­pore has much greater lessons to teach them. It is very im­por­tant if not piv­otal that our lead­ers eval­u­ate the Sin­ga­pore mod­el recog­nis­ing their re­mark­able trans­for­ma­tions de­void of any oil and gas yet de­vel­op­ing as a na­tion in the ear­ly 60s, to a high in­come glob­al hub dri­ven by it’s vi­sion­ary leader Lee Kuan Yew pro­mot­ing an ex­port dri­ven eco­nom­ic strat­e­gy cre­at­ing enor­mous for­eign in­vest­ment, strong gov­er­nance to its long­stand­ing sta­tus of enor­mous suc­cess, en­act­ing dis­dain for crime and drugs, now a high-tech fi­nan­cial pow­er­house.

Sad­ly, since Trinidad’s eco­nom­ic land­scape is fil­tered with over-es­teemed sabo­teurs and parochial lit­tle bankers, it would be dif­fi­cult for lo­cal bankers to even con­sid­er the re­quired fund­ing for am­bi­tious en­tre­pre­neurs. With mas­sive “prof­its” and shame­less­ly poor ser­vice, Trinidad is un­der­banked, and this ad­min­is­tra­tion should al­so in­vite for­eign banks to es­tab­lish busi­ness here, thus trans­form­ing our eco­nom­ic land­scape, cre­at­ing a bet­ter qual­i­ty of life for our cit­i­zens, more so the am­bi­tious yet down­trod­den. They should not be too slow or in­ca­pable of eco­nom­ic di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion. Fur­ther, they should in­vite and grant cit­i­zen­ship to a few for­eign en­tre­pre­neurs, tak­ing com­fort in the in­deli­ble land­mark Carl­ton K Mack, An­tho­ny Sab­ga, Lawrence Duprey, and many oth­ers con­tributed to our econ­o­my, in­creased our GDP, de­creased un­em­ploy­ment and cre­at­ed enor­mous­ly to our tax­a­tion.

Trinidad is a beau­ti­ful and blessed coun­try which nev­er de­vel­oped af­ter 63 years.

Trevor Hosten is an en­tre­pre­neur and con­sumer ad­vo­cate, and the founder of Pub­lic In­ter­est Re­search Group (PIRG), which pe­ti­tioned gov­ern­ment for, and ob­tained Trinidad’s Bank­ing Om­buds­man (now the FSO), and the Bank­rupt­cy and In­sol­ven­cy ACT of 2006.