By Raffique Shah
Sunday, October 12th 2008
I grew to dislike Budget presentations and the debates that followed them during my five short years as a parliamentarian. For most of that period, the then Prime Minister, Dr Eric Williams, was also Minister of Finance. Like most intellectuals who were also heads of governments in that era, Williams reveled in making lengthy presentations. Having a captive audience comprising 35 MPs, a number of senators and other high-ranking public officials who felt it was their duty to be present for the budget, Williams would drone on and on, sometimes for five, six hours.
Continue reading In Trinidad, the piper calls the tune
Steve Kroft looks at some of the arcane Wall Street financial instruments that have magnified the economic crisis.
On what basis can PM Manning justify spending an astronomical $503m (one percent of the 2009 budget that is equivalent to the sum for the construction of the Tobago power plant) to host the Summits of the Americas and the Commonwealth in 2009 if not to boost his already inflated ego? What diplomatic goodwill and political and economic benefits will accrue to the pauperized people of T&T from hosting these Conferences when we are burdened with a poverty rate of 27%? The poverty gap is widening and pensioners on fixed incomes are ketching their “nennen”.
It’s the kind of story that would get a cat vex or make a donkey want to commit murder. Imagine a young, imaginative entrepreneur, someone who does not possess a “gimme-gimme” mentality, comes into town and tells the world that he will build an empire that would make anything Sat Maharaj ever dreamed of doing look like a doll’s house. He starts a credit union and offers interest rates unlike anything the nation has ever heard; at least, not since the days of International Trust when my mother got burned because of her greed. People began to invest in this credit union and before you could say Pan-Dey it was the hottest thing in town.
A self-imposed media embargo seems to have overtaken Minister Colm Imbert lately on the tenuous fate of his TRRP. This prognosis has been reinforced by the negative and depressing body language that he displayed while communicating to the press at Whitehall on the Interchange. I am coming to the intuitive conclusion that Cabinet seems to have ordered secretly a pre-emptive moratorium against the TRRP, in an election year, to avoid any further disastrous fallout from another major reversal and embarrassment while the wounds inflicted by the Chatham debacle are still fresh, politically painful and electorally threatening.