By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
October 16, 2024

After the People’s National Movement came into power in 1956, Eric Williams took an inordinate length of time (sometimes as much as three hours) to deliver his budget speeches. He used them to reach his fellow citizens since the means of communication were not as widely available as they are today. It was also a way to expand the democratic process.

Today we live in an era of Facebook and TikTok. It is anachronistic for a minister of finance to spend five hours delivering a budget speech. It reflects an attitude of someone living in the past.

If, as the minister alleges, the people who reject “a cashless society…are stuck in the Stone Age”, then someone who takes five hours to deliver a budget speech is probably stuck in the pre-colonial age.

This, however, is not my primary concern of a budget speech that took as its theme, “Steadfast and Resolute: Forging Pathways to Prosperity”, the suggestion being that if we become more prosperous materially we will be better off socially and morally.

Last year’s theme was “Reform, Reinvest and Reimagine”. We have not reimagined or reformed our society since then. I think we have regressed in significant ways.

I will not quibble with our economic performance or the minister’s projections except to say we cannot predict with any certainty what our condition will be in 2027 without making important reforms.

One only has to look at the headlines of last week’s newspapers to realise that last year’s budget has not made us more prosperous, morally or materially. They simply confirm our Lord’s injunction: “It is written, man shall not live by bread alone.”

In 2023, T&T “was ranked 105 out of 190 countries in ease of doing business”. PricewaterhouseCoopers identified the five top challenges we faced: “…corruption; foreign exchange, crime and security; low productivity in the national labour force; and government bureaucracy” (PwC, Budget Insights, 2024).

Today we are more corrupt than we were last year; we have greater problems with getting foreign exchange, while local productivity, crime and security remain major problems. Uncontrolled crime is at the centre of our society. We cannot solve that problem by simply “extracting illegal guns from the criminal element”, especially when the Leader of Our Grief says we are “a violent society”.

The budget speech suffers from a lack of serious, in-depth thinking about how to proceed. Apart from the minister’s bluster, we are left with an epistemological challenge: quantity (how big my budget is) versus quality (how prosperous we are); oversight (superficial description) rather than insight (the causal connection); and a rehashing of the old without presenting anything new.

In other words, the budget was the same old, same old, presented without any attempt to analyse the causes of our fundamental problems.

The Finance Minister informs us there are bigger fish to fry; that is, “individuals and companies earning millions of dollars income per year who do not pay their fair share of taxes”.

However, the bigger fishes are those who are involved in corrupt activities that lie at the heart of the system. It results in a much larger financial drain on society than the lost income these big fishes extract.

The wisest thing the Government can do to prevent this massive looting of the State is to use the Civil Asset Recovery and Management and Unexpected Wealth Act 2018 to go after the corrupt politicians and business people. We have used this act against criminals. We should use it against our corrupt politicians, ministers and civil servants—ie, our white-collar criminals.

Imagine how purified our society would be if our white-collar criminals had to explain the sources of their wealth after they left office, or if officers of the law could investigate their sources of wealth before they left office.

The schizophrenia of the Leader of Our Grief is also at issue here. The Minister of Finance began his speech by saying: “I must express my gratitude to Dr the Honourable Keith Rowley…for his support and astute leadership over the past nine years.” It is strange then that the Leader should want to disassociate himself from the bad things that have happened under his watch.

A leader who takes credit for the good things that happen under his watch must also assume responsibility for the bad things that happened as well. A leader who does not know or understand such a moral precept does not know or understand what it means to hold such a position.

It is this ethical blindness that undergirds the Leader’s concept of leadership. Ethical leadership is as important as economic accomplishment and this is where the Leader has failed his people. He might want to take a deeper look within to see what’s going on.