The Ministry of Tomorrow

BitDepth#1256

IN THIS space, on various occasions, I've floated the idea that ICT needs a czar to drive implementation and strategic development in TT.

The benchmark for such thinking is the career of Prof Ken Julien, widely recognised as a champion for greater control of this country's energy resources over the last five decades.

Such lionising tends to gloss over the fact that Julien was part of a determined pride of similar minds in the seventh decade of the 20th century who pressed forward with the lunatic notion that TT need not depend on First World nations and their well-equipped companies to manage and exploit its own energy resources effectively.

It was never possible to completely wean ourselves off a dependency on massive oil and gas companies and their equipment for a full exploitation of our petroleum resources, but significant inroads were made in diversifying what was then the monolithic attention on oil.

The first step on that journey was almost unimaginable: the idea of taking natural gas, then being flared off as a waste byproduct of oil production, and building an industry out of it.

At Point Lisas, the marriage between the dominant business of southern Trinidad and the need for a new industrial port was being consummated.

It's instructive to note that the relationship between the private sector and government in the construction of what would become known as Plipdeco was disturbingly familiar. Project after project for the nascent industrial estate ran aground on public-sector bureaucracy.

Capitalisation was one issue. The South Chamber could not finance the considerable construction required. The government declined to invest public finances into a privately controlled company.

The deadlock was broken in 1976 when the government took effective control of Plipdeco through share acquisition.

By appointing Julien to lead the Plipdeco project as chairman in 1976, along with his appointment to lead the NGC, prime minister Dr Eric Williams made him his good right hand in making a dream of local resource capitalisation a reality.

In his 2005 Eric Williams Memorial Lecture, Julien would recall the late prime minister's mantra as, "Tie up the petro-dollar in the productive sector; and invest in our youth."

Today that productive sector has moved on, but the investment in our youth has not, nor has it evolved.

Without a guiding star for the ICT sector, projects like the the Technology Park at Wallerfield, the digital equivalent of Plipdeco, have all but collapsed.

Plans dating from the original 2003 Fast Forward project have been largely shelved; elements brought into action piecemeal by commercial interests when it suited their bottom line and governments when it offered good PR.

The Roadmap to Recovery committee needed to engage with ICT leadership after emerging from three months in which it was made dramatically clear that effective technology implementation was a critical lubricant for national development.

After having our faces collectively shoved into that cold reality, the committee was convened without a single authoritative and experienced representative from the ICT sector.

The results of their deliberations have proven that choice to have no one not only stupid, but potentially economic suicide.

At Cabinet level, there is no single person or team charged with futuring the destiny of TT.

What's needed is a Ministry of Tomorrow, a multi-sectoral authority capable of not just mapping our technology-driven future, but also of making it happen through direct investment, both foreign and local, and effective private sector collaborations.

In this century, we needed 'bout ten Kens to match the impact that Julien had on the energy sector in the late 70s and 80s.

We haven't even got even one.

Mark Lyndersay is the editor of technewstt.com. An expanded version of this column can be found there