THA, the new CEPEP?

EVERY year, the State allocates about $400 million to support thousands of workers employed by the CEPEP company in Trinidad and Tobago.

But it seems CEPEP is not the country’s only make-work programme.

On Sunday, the Prime Minister, in a direct appeal to voters in the upcoming Tobago House of Assembly (THA) election, invited all to be content that the THA employs about 60 per cent of the island’s workforce.

“They tell you also that there are too many people employed by the THA,” Dr Rowley said, acknowledging the THA is not supposed to have a monopoly on workers.

“But until such time that the private sector has grown and developed opportunities for some people, I think you should be happy that there is a THA that has stood in the breach in the time being, until better can be done.”

Effectively, the Prime Minister has conceded that the THA, whatever functions its departments pursue, effectively amounts to a make-work programme.

Better can be done. Better should have been done long ago.

It’s clear the PM has a similar view of employment in the public service as a whole.

But whereas there is a strong sense of at least a theoretical push for diversifying the industrial base of Trinidad’s economy, Dr Rowley seems increasingly fixed on one primary solution to the employment situation in Tobago: building more hotels.

In the next four years, he said, “We of the PNM will create opportunities for that – it is to encourage more construction of hotel rooms in Tobago. Some people have a problem with that.”

With Tobago already a prime tourism destination, it makes sense to exploit infrastructure already in place to boost that sector. Suitable hotel projects can supply work.

But the Prime Minister’s approach to this agenda is often without tolerance for any sort of feedback from civil society, no matter how reasonable.

“Some people are actually boasting about how they actually prevented the Sandals project from being introduced in Tobago,” he said, bringing up the issue of that failed project yet again without any attentiveness to the serious environmental issues it raised, or the possibility that having huge concrete hotels placed arbitrarily around the island could damage Tobago’s landscape.

We are pushing for “green energy” and “clean hydrocarbons,” but we give feeble support to eco-tourism, for which Tobago could become a world leader, with its enviable birdwatching and its historic forest reserve – the oldest in the hemisphere.

What seems to matter more to the Government is silencing critics of hotel plans that don’t, in any event, build true job security. Rather, by tethering employment to construction and seasonal tourism, these plans condemn workers to make-work programmes under a different guise.