Kamla: ‘Same old, same old’ promises

UNIMPRESSED:Opposition Leader Kamla Persad-Bissessar and fellow MPs David Lee, left, and Rodney Charles were clearly unimpressed with Government⁳ mid-year Budget review delivered by Finance Minister Colm Imbert in Parliament yesterday. PHOTO BY ROGER JACOB
UNIMPRESSED:Opposition Leader Kamla Persad-Bissessar and fellow MPs David Lee, left, and Rodney Charles were clearly unimpressed with Government⁳ mid-year Budget review delivered by Finance Minister Colm Imbert in Parliament yesterday. PHOTO BY ROGER JACOB

AN unimpressed Kamla Persad-Bissessar blasted the government yesterday in her rebuttal to Finance Minister Colm Imbert’s mid-year budget review, reducing his speech to the “same old, same old” rhetoric of previous promises.

Presenting to the Parliament immediately after Imbert, she latched on to his closing quote from American reggae and pop singer Johnny Nash’s song “I can see clearly now, the rain is gone,” comparing Imbert instead to blind artiste Stevie Wonder. “He can’t see,” she said.

Persad-Bissessar also hearkened back to the theme of last October’s budget, Changing the Paradigm. “Nothing has changed. We are still chained to the energy sector.”

Imbert had attributed the country’s fledgling economic recovery, after years of recession and stagnation, on a rebound in the natural gas sector, and praised his party– the PNM– for overseeing it. Persad-Bissessar would have none of it. “He has come here to say production is booming, booming, booming! But has said nothing on how he will incentivise the sector that the nation is handcuffed to. He can’t put us on a sustainable path on its own,” she said, adding that it was her administration, under her former Energy minister Kevin Ramnarine, who laid the groundwork for the benefits in the gas sector that the country is reaping.

Imbert, she said, was like Gollum, the character from Lord of the Rings, with a “gimme gimme attitude,” much like the character craved the One Ring—a comparison she had also made in October.

“I was hoping he would not be like Gollum, but instead like Frodo, the true hero revealing his plans and policy from despair, defeat and destruction. I listened, I listened, I listened, and at the end of it I realised nothing had changed.”

People in the country cannot feel the good fortune of which Imbert boasts, she said, because they are at the mercy of criminal elements, in the throes of poverty, depressed and in a profound state of joblessness. The only thing the government has delivered to the poor people of TT was taxes, she said. The government, she said, had failed to deliver one major project. The inflation rate was low, she said, not because of the government’s monetary policy, but because of a lack of economic activity. The constraints on access to foreign exchange, she added, has paralysed small businesses. “The paradise we left in 2015 is now a nightmare republic in present day. We are a country that has crashed, where life has never been as nasty, brutish and short as it is now.”

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