The shallowest politicians are those who seek credit for positive developments to which they have contributed nothing. In their latest slanted focus on the economy, Prime Minister Keith Rowley and Finance Minister Colm Imbert predicted a “strong recovery” with a $2 billion deficit for fiscal year 2022, significantly smaller than the two biggest: $16.9 billion dollars in 2020 and 12.35 billion dollars. in 2021.
What a scam! There is no political or financial magic here. The cause is high oil and gas prices from post-Covid demand and especially reduced global supply from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “We need more than Putin’s war to stimulate the economy,” says San Fernando Business Association President Daphne Bartlett, calling for diversification and sustainability.
But after seven years during which he has not developed any new streams of foreign income, Rowley, to justify his useless European trip, calls a press conference to tell the country, as if we have not known him for a long time our debilitating energy dependence, that if natural gas prospects do not improve, we are in deep trouble. Spare us the rot prime minister. Tell us what you have done for him for seven wasted years.
The economy has fallen six years in a row under Imbert and Rowley. Two days after their self-congratulations, when Imbert spoke of their “policies supporting a broad-based and robust recovery”, the CSO revealed “a massive drop” of four percent in output for the first quarter of 2022, with both the energy and non-energy sectors shrinking by 1.3 percent and 5.2 percent, respectively.
That means light manufacturing, retail, services and construction have all slowed. But Rowley says the retail sector has revived and is now “vibrant”. No, says Bartlett, “retail is slow across the board. I don’t know where the prime minister got the information that businesses are booming. Apart from supermarkets, businesses are struggling to stay afloat.”
Indeed, we have had a massive overall decline during the Rowley/Imbert tenure. In 2014, T&T’s real GDP was $187.1 billion. At the end of 2021 it was $149.6 billion, a 20 percent drop over their seven failed years, a fact ignored in their latest fraudulent Spotlight!
And shouldn’t agriculture be a priority, given the current food security emergency? The highlight of this administration’s agriculture is that Rowley is doing the full rot, shamefully, with Caricom leaders in attendance, that Trinidad and Tobago has been “ahead” of food security when, as everyone knows, after 60 for years the sector is stuck in primitiveness in this country. . In seven years, they did nothing while the food import bill exceeded $5 billion, giving agriculture a tiny annual percentage of national budgets that amounted to almost $400 billion, resulting in the sector’s contribution of just 0.4 percent in GDP!
And they have devastated the energy sector, which has lost 9,200 direct jobs since 2015, the CSO says, with professionals fleeing the country and output remaining low for seven years. Had Rowley and Imbert secured more output by overhauling their 2017 fiscal regime, for example, this country could have been profitable at today’s oil and gas prices.
And especially if they had not committed the unforgivable sin of closing the Petrotrin refinery. Refineries are now making five times as much money as a year ago: US$43.11 for gasoline, up 366 percent; and $51.13 in oil—a 648 percent increase! Imagine the phenomenal profits for Trinidad and Tobago by operating Petrotrin. And they closed our refinery against the advice of international experts and their own chairman and board, who all advised “not to close the restructuring”.
Petrotrin’s products grossed $350 million a year and the company paid $20.2 billion in taxes between 2010 and 2016, while employing 10,000 people, directly and indirectly. Prof Theodore Lewis says that “the dismantling of Petrotrin will rank as the most thoughtless and reckless act that a leader has ever perpetrated on the population in our corner of the Caribbean”.
And how much are we spending now to import the gasoline and oil that Petrotrin used to produce?! $3.5 billion between December 2018 and January 2022, says OWTU chief Ancel Roget, citing finance ministry documents. Spending instead of earning foreign exchange. Can you imagine how much it is costing us now when the prices have increased by 366 percent and 648 percent respectively for gasoline and diesel?! Will the government tell the nation, sparing us the rot, how many borrowed billions have been used to import the Petrotrin petrol and oil it used to produce? And how much more will be borrowed at sky-high prices? And will they also say how, without new flows of foreign revenue, we will service our gigantic national debt of $126.6 billion, most of which must be repaid in US dollars? Will the country ask to be told?
-Ralph Maraj
