TT must seek best natural oil deal

The late unlamented — by right-thinking people, of course — self-styled “General” Forbes Burnham, President of Guyana once quipped that he was looking for a one-armed economist because whenever he consulted an economist he would be told, “On the one hand, whereas on the other...” Apparently Burnham must have eventually come across an economist without a single arm or he must have ignored economists altogether and took his own counsel. How else can we explain how he managed, single-handedly to pauperise, beyond belief, a country so rich in natural resources? We’ve often heard the saying that, “Money is the root of all evil.” Actually, what the good book said was that, “The love of money is the root of all evil.” In the political arena, it’s not so much that money or the lack thereof that’s the bigger problem but it’s management or rather mismanagement that is at the heart of many a problem. We’ve been through lean years followed by years of plenty followed by even leaner years and we’re now assured by our government spokesmen and sundry economists that we’re approaching the cusp of a gigantic “boom” and the best days are coming - “and they coming and they coming and they coming.” Now “bust to boom and boom to bust” is an experience not unknown in these parts. In fact, at one time, we were known — not without a degree of ridicule — as the “arabs of the Caribbean.” At the same time we were expected to fulfil the role of, what the calypsonians called, “the Caribbean’s godfather.”

Others have done more with much less but when the sun is shining we never expect that there will come “a rainy day.” It’s not that when the first “guava season” was approaching it came upon us like the proverbial “thief in the night.” Those who saw the early signals and asked us to “take warning” were summarily dismissed as “prophets of doom and gloom.” Things got really bad and some have even speculated that Dr Williams’ so-called “resignation” had much less to do with the reasons given than the dismal state of the economy at that time. As luck would have it, OPEC came to our rescue (an unintended consequence, I might add) and we suddenly found ourselves filthy rich, with money to burn, or, as they say, we (primarily the government) spent, spent and squandered, like money was going out of style. Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley commented caustically on how Trinidad’s oil dollar windfall simply passed through their economic system “like a dose of salts.” I know that, in some quarters, it’s considered “politically sacrilegious” to be critical of Dr Williams and apportion any blame to him after he’s so long gone, but I’ve long held the view that we continue to languish in the quagmire of some of his legacies. Basdeo Panday’s political emergence not being among the least.

Williams himself was not an economist by profession. That’s not to say that he could not avail himself of the best economic advice or was incapable of assessing such. But political imperatives can sometimes distort one’s vision. I’ve had some difficulty reconciling Dr Williams’ focus on economic planning when the country’s financial position was (shall we say, tight) and his cavalier dismissal of “the mystique of economic planning” when we had oodles of money and could conceivably have used the surplus income to ensure a variable economy that was not so dependent on our petroleum resource and therefore vulnerable to the vagaries of the international markets over which we have very little, if any, control. Today, it’s not only a question of oil but vast proven reserves of natural gas. However vast those reserves may be, the fact of the matter is that there is a finite dimension to that and we’re dealing with what is called “a wasting asset.” This of course, assumes that the world demand situation continues to be favourable, as far as we are concerned. It seems to me — economic simpleton that I am — that deriving the best deal from our natural gas, while the going is good, (monetisation, I think they call it) and budgeting at a level that allows us to use the excess income when prices are high as a buffer when they go down.

There’s also this problem of “jobless growth!” It’s small comfort to an unemployed or underemployed person to be told that the economy is on “an upward path” and doing fine. There’s the related question of equitable distribution of income between what is now known as “the haves and have-nots.” All this may sound like the usual tralala that we hear from time to time but it has to be factored into the equation of budgetary exercises. Most people or group interests would have proposed their grocery wish lists and since the politicians concerned have been painting an ultra-rosy picture of the national purse or, at any rate, prospective manna from our gas and oil fields then there must be high expectation that a plaster would be found for every sore. Now since Williams’ time we’ve been expected to be impressed by the impressive amounts of money thrown at problems. There’s also the tendency to go for mega-projects and “white elephants” and hare-brained schemes. We know only too well from past experience that politicians are only too keen to put “stairways to heaven” on the drawing board and only succeed in providing “subways to hell” at the original expense.

In any real country with a real government and a real parliamentary opposition one would expect that the government’s budgetary proposals would be the catalyst for much informed analysis and exposition of the financial realities and philosophical underpinnings (if any) so that the average person like myself can get a better grasp of where this country is and where it might be going. That might be too much to hope for, given the track record of Manning and his rabbits and Panday and his poodles. Brace yourself, gentle reader, for moronic mudwrestling, finger-pointing, vacuous rhetoric, well-rehearsed theatrics and comic relief galore. My only problem with Rev Cyril Paul who sought God’s intercession on behalf of supposed parliamentary “miscreants” is that he probably wasted his and God’s time. In my considered view, nothing short of a bush or saltfish tail bath is likely to do the trick. So say I, so say we all!