Cabrera: PM must temper his tone

“I don’t know if he wants to become a trade union leader,” Cabrera quipped, “but he needs to temper his tone.” Cabrera criticised Rowley yesterday at a post-Budget breakfast forum hosted by the Oilfields Workers’ Trade Union (OWTU) and the Co-operative Credit Union League of TT at the OWTU’s Paramount Building in San Fernando. He was responding to Rowley’s statements made on Saturday at the launch of the Ministry of Education’s School Improvement Project at the Success Laventille Secondary School. Rowley lamented that “every road to be built in this country must be built by the Government, every school, every health centre, every this, every that, because in this country for the last generation or two, we have grown up on the Government.” Cabrera acknowledged the country’s difficult economic times but suggested the nation considers them as challenges that are more than possible to overcome. This, he argued, would be a better approach than telling people to not depend on the Government, and if the Government wants the support of the people to drive the economy forward, it should recognise its role in doing so. “Developing countries need the State more than ever,” Cabrera said.

University of the West Indies economist Indira Sajewan-Ali, one of six panellists, said that the Prime Minister’s statements offended her. She agreed that TT has a “dependence economy” as over 60 percent of the Budget goes into subsidies and government transfers like CEPEP and URP.

However, this dependence was not chosen by the people but fostered on them by “successive governments who have deliberately used the largess from the oil and gas sector to implement a programme of dependency economics.” Sajewan-Ali went on to remind Rowley that the money used by the Government is drawn from taxpayers and is supposed to be used on their behalf.

President of the Trinidad Unified Farmers Union, Shiraz Khan, said that current legislation limits the growth of the farming industry, forcing farmers to be dependent on the State. “Who else do I go to if not the State?” he asked. “I have to come to you to get land because it is the State that owns the land.” Shiraz called on the Government to change the legislation which, according to him, limits farmers to erecting only one building on their two acres of land which they do not own themselves.