Retooling our minds

The appeal made by Carenage youths to Prime Minister Patrick Manning on Wednesday for permanent Unemployment Relief Programme (URP) jobs, in addition to being a contradiction was also an indication of how deep-rooted the dependency syndrome is.

The Unemployment Relief Programme, which had its genesis in the Special Works Programme of the middle 1960s, had been basically designed to provide temporary work for jobless persons while they sought permanent employment. Clearly, however, the purpose of the programme still has not sunken in after some four decades. And while the misconception may have been publicly voiced by a few Carenage youths, during Prime Minister Manning’s walkabout in distressed areas last week, the belief that Government was supposed to provide employment may be far more widespread. 

Conversely, the question can be asked: What has the taxpaying public received in return from the hundreds of thousands of jobs, albeit temporary, which have been generated since the 1960s advent of the Special Works Programme. While few would have reasonably challenged the need of Government at the time, in the wake of the rising expectations of the people following on Independence, to provide economic relief through temporary job programmes, relatively few of the beneficiaries were prepared to give “a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay.”

What the youths should be demanding, instead of ‘permanent’ temporary jobs, or that Government be responsible for the provisions of jobs per se to the country’s unemployed, is the expansion by Government of its skills development programme.  The truth is that the Special Works Programme and its several name changes — DEWD, LID and URP — have failed.

What Government needs to do is to produce a Ten-Year Economic Development Programme with the accent on the transformation of the economy. This should embrace the equipping of young people with needed skills, plumbing, masonry, carpentry, welding, modern farming methods, the efficient reaping, packaging and marketing of their produce, food and meat processing, the running of small businesses. In addition it should create and/or lease out areas for industrial estates, with specific reference to Central and South Trinidad.

In turn, it should develop a road and bridge building and/or expansion programme to facilitate the bringing out not only of the farmers produce, but that of small, medium and large manufacturing plants in these industrial estates. The accent would be on the easier reaching of internal and external customers. A crucial part of this must be the marketing of the new thrust, along with the reason for it, to the young people. Side by side with the above must be the development of new curriculum strategies for the nation’s schools.

Trinidad and Tobago has to grasp that the advent of the World Trade Organisation and with the around the corner establishment of the Free Trade Area of the Americas and the imminent breaking down of protective tariff barriers demand a new thinking. There must be a new approach to education and business, to the way we do things, if we are not to be submerged in the rising sea of free trade, aided by serious attention in other countries to skills training and development. The retooling of our industries and young minds must be seen as the way to go, rather than simply the philosophy of handouts.