MACRO MISMANAGEMENT

One of our Prime Minister’s recent boasts was that TT was going to become the world’s largest consumer of electricity — on a per capita basis. By 2012 Ladies and Gentlemen, TT will be in the top three countries measured by electrical consumption on a per capita basis — and by 2016 Ladies and Gentlemen, we will be number one! Whoopee! It is symptomatic of Manning’s condition that he used the word “consumption” rather than “generation” or “production”. But in a country where new glass buildings come before health care and education, the idea of consumption has a much more “catchy” sound.
It sounds so First World. Of course, the statistic is totally meaningless, because nearly all of the electricity generated will be used in massive industrial plants, and the domestic market — the true “per capita” consumption will not increase that much. Or will it? Will the PNM faithful, in celebration of this new status, all run out and buy more appliances, and air condition their yards? This consumption of electricity “fame” which we seek will all be in the two proposed aluminium smelters and other industrial complexes, the preparations for which seem to be for our account.
Apparently we did not even ask Alcoa to pay for the destruction of the rubber forests at Union Village, Vessigny. We paid for that! We paid to wipe out hectares of valuable rubber trees, and to kill all the wildlife there. I predict, as others before me have said, that the building of these smelters at Union Village and Chatham, will prove to be monumental mistakes. I say this based on the knowledge of the macro mismanagement our country has had to endure over the past 30 years or so.
Just next door to Union village, in Brighton, La Brea, the government in the mid 1990s destroyed the beautiful golf course. They did this in order to build the LNG plant there. Every child in La Brea, over five years old, knows you cannot build a major structure there. The asphalt, which spreads out from the Pitch Lake to the sea is technically a liquid, and it moves all the time. However what is known to every child in La Brea was not known to the PM who is a geologist.
After we paid contractors to obliterate the golf course, it was “discovered” that the area was in fact liquid, and the LNG plant went to Point Fortin. The golf course remains destroyed, and La Brea remains a forgotten place. Why did they think of La Brea in the first place? Votes of course! If politicians can fool a community for just one election, their “business fix” for five years.
The desalination plant has been in the news recently — and rightly so. It must be one of the least needed facilities in our history — so why was it built? But let me not go there — the law is touchy these days about commentary on matters before the courts. But I can tell you why it should not have been built. First, I need to remind you that WASA loses — according to a mid-1980s World Bank Report — 60 percent of its water through its own broken mains. The NAR government was negotiating a loan with the World Bank to replace the broken and leaking water mains. The project was almost at the tendering for construction stage when the NAR lost the 1991 election. The PNM — as is the wont of immature governments in little countries — had to review the whole procedure, so sixty percent of our water, for which we pay to produce, continued to be wasted.
When the PNM was voted out in 1995, they were nearly ready to sign up with the World Bank. However, the UNC now had to review the project, and apparently came up with a “better” idea. Lying to the people that they needed to produce more water to achieve their “Water for All” slogan — they came up with the Desalination Plant. You can read the rest of this story through evidence in the courts. So today, we still lose 60 percent of our water through leaking mains, except we are producing more, so we are losing more — and we are paying foreigners millions of dollars for this privilege.
The Minister of Works has declared that we have too few contractors to carry out government’s development plans. Look out TT — its Government to Government contracts coming back again. If anyone wants to look at my copy of the Lennox Ballah Report into Government to Government contracts, they are welcome. The opportunities for corruption, the inferior quality of design (check Piarco Airport even without Government to Government), poor workmanship, time and cost overruns were all recorded features of the contracts which government negotiated with foreign contractors — without competing bids.
If you owned a bakery, and there was great demand for your bread, but there were shortages of flour, yeast and water — what would you do? Hire more bakers? I am sure you would not. But that is just what the Minister is doing. And there is a reason for this — and the reason is described in the Ballah Report.
In a society so much more corrupt today than 20 years ago, do you need to ask how these foreign contractors are going to win their work? And ten years into this construction boom, we are seeking to bring in skilled labour while thousands of young men — admittedly untrained — lime idly in Carenage, Water Hole, Laventille, Maloney and San Fernando. Full employment — Ha! “Full employment” is an illusion created by people who rent their names to CEPEP and URP contractors.
The macro-mistakes I have described here continue to cost us dearly. They are a part of the reason that we have no health care, that you have no water in your pipes and that the roads — none built in 30 years! — are clogged with traffic.
The mistakes represent macro mismanagement of the highest order — most not the result of incompetence, but of carefully plotted schemes. The people who do this to us are the people for who you continually vote. Think about that.