Jagdeo's uncomfortable truths

PAOLO KERNAHAN

GUYANESE Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo mounted an ornery donkey with his home truths about TT.

Not surprisingly, his blunt assessment of our economic health has been widely repudiated. Many took issue with the propriety of his message rather than its veracity. But hey, you know us Trinis – bad-talking God's country is a privilege reserved for citizens.

What sat like a burr in many saddles was this line in particular, "...T&T is falling apart." At the heart of his message was a warning that Guyana, poised for a nose-bleed ascent, should be wary of travelling the potholed road TT has taken. It's a path that led us to an over-reliance on natural resources, triggering serious, enduring repercussions for the rest of the orphaned economy – the dreaded, well-documented Dutch Disease.

We won't take that kind of trash-talking from a Guyanese politician, but perhaps we'll swallow it from the Inter-American Development Bank. The IDB produced a report in 2018 about the phenomenon. Care to guess the title of that report? The Dutch Disease Phenomenon and Lessons for Guyana: Trinidad and Tobago's Experience. But sure, let's pelt that outta-timin' outsider who's trying to kick us while we're down, or up – who the hell knows, right?

That's the trouble. Whether this country's falling apart is, unfortunately, a subjective affair. TT has never been big on data or the big picture. People's beliefs are therefore influenced by their circumstances, agendas and political biases. Without hard, current figures we're left to assemble our own picture with the limiting pixels of what we're told and what we see. Trinis are still buying cars, liming in bars and shopping, so the economy is doing as well as can be expected. This isn't a reasonable way to take the pulse of an economy.

The unemployment rate has gone through peaks and troughs since 1999. It started climbing steadily in 2015. This trend coincided with the collapse in oil pricing that dug its claws in around 2014.

The available unemployment figures, however, will not touch the vast numbers of jobs lost due to the demise of several small and medium-sized businesses before and during the pandemic. If beleaguered businesses don't report these numbers to the Ministry of Labour it's as though those job losses never happened. Unemployment figures also don't reflect the number of underemployed in this country; folks who can't get sufficient work to keep afloat.

What about the powerful “falling apart” imagery? While this assessment flirts with hyperbole, there's some fire behind Jagdeo's smoke. For example, infrastructure across the country has been in steady decay for years. Roads and bridges get only modest attention and there is a crassly disproportionate application of resources.

Several areas outside of the capital city and major urban centres have the look and feel of a separate country – one that never had obscene oil wealth.

Along with unemployment, crime and insecurity have also been steadily on the increase, regardless of stone-faced denials from the Government. Forex issues are perennially problematic as this country's earning capacity remains hamstrung. With our eyes firmly fixed on an ever-diminishing resource, like a 90s boy band we're still expecting a comeback to our oil and gas, tight pants glory days.

The Guyanese vice president also said he's aware of negative opinions openly expressed by Trinidadians about Guyana's uneasy relationship with democracy. Jagdeo graciously accepts that many of those opinions are well founded. Imagine what we in TT could learn if we admitted our failings. Well, eef you like countries like dat, go dere!

Rather than working ourselves into a lather over Jagdeo's perceived “disrespek,” we should be working to mend fractured relations between our countries. In other words, the opposite of what this administration did in failing to show at the Guyana Energy Conference. The Government should put its people ahead of unproductive false pride for the sake of creating room in Guyana for gasping local businesses.

Bharrat Jagdeo's comments may have been impolitic, but truth doesn't always wear a three-piece suit.

TT and Guyana have a lot to offer each other. Nothing has been said or done that can't be water under the pontoon bridge in the mutual interests of both nations.

We all want the same thing: to grow and see our people flourish – to be part of a region looking to the future. Now all that's left is for the Government of TT to share the same ambition.