A daunting task to revitalise country

THE EDITOR: The existing gloom and doom pervading TT, is, essentially, living proof the nation is in the throes of a vortex deliberately brought on by the debilitating administration and application of our fuel-fossil wealth in the 53 years since 1974, when the first oil boom descended.

Consequently, our manufacturing sector is today more dependent on foreign reserves, the scarcity of which has rendered many of them unable to buffer the onslaught of overpriced forex: all have stuttered; many have shuttered entirely; lately, thousands and thousands of deeply-rooted employees have been summarily thrown on the breadline.

The single largest employer — the State — battling stoically to prevent citizen riot, has openly and quietly begun offloading State-owned fixed assets to meet recurrent expenses.

Is there any escape from the nauseating bellyache before total constipation grips?

Is there any visionary who can galvanise myopic and competing — and self-seeking — business interests into medicating TT with the required revitalising purge and tonic?

It’s a daunting task, seeing that, from ever since, most of these interests have been no more than glorified commission agents content with creaming off stupendous windfalls rather than reinvesting to the greater glory of the nation.

Want specific proof? Just look at the banking and insurance sectors. Which of those consolidated and bloated hulks can be described as entrepreneurial? Yet their very existence is based on risk.

These juggernauts need to take a giant step back: instead of building on top of already top-heavy cash reserves, they ought to propel funds towards constructing and driving the entrepreneurial spirit.

To accomplish this bold mission, their boardrooms need to be swept and cobwebbed to make space for a new breed of managers who will hit the ground wearing tracksuits of patriotic optimism.

If their owners resist or won’t voluntarily buy in and reverse course, legislation must coerce.

Otherwise, there’s little chance of the GDP overcoming deep-set sluggishness, far less of accelerating and gaining momentum. Or us becoming a true-true cesspool.

Little chance, too, of avoiding the IMF’s clutches and becoming a comprehensively foreign-abused country where even the best and brightest can, at best, only get sweltering employment at $90 a day in public-funded programmes like CEPEP.

RICHARD WM THOMAS, 5 Rivers, Arouca