Give us significance!

December 05, 2001

Politics in T&T has been reduced to the ridiculous. We are an island community of just over one million citizens graced with a fortune of oil and gas, the proven reserves of the latter having recently been put at 13 trillion cubic feet and increasing.

We are a dependent economy with direct foreign investments to the tune of some US$6 billion largely expended in the oil, gas and petro-chemical industries.

And as is the case in all historic arrangements between peripherals (ie dependent underdeveloped economies) and epicentres (ie modern, industrialised metropolis), the raison d'etre of all economic activity within the borders of the peripheral territory is geared to the satiation, satisfaction and value-added accumulation that generates ongoing development for the metropolitan source of investment funds.

In the peripheral society, development is lopsided and fragmented as the sectors in which foreign investments are ploughed, the commanding heights, stand unrelated to the manufacturing and commercial activities of the domestic "home" economy.

The fundamental issue before societies like T&T is to conceptualise and design a developmental path that will remove this fracture and integrate all the economic sectors for the purpose, first and foremost, of our own capital accumulation and in the interests of our own human resources.

Of course the first criticism that will be thrown at such a view is that we are a society of only one million and too small a market economy to sustain any departure from what has obtained for centuries. But size has little to do with it.

We must struggle to become more inward-looking rather than outward-looking. It demands a whole new orientation and mindset. Only we ourselves can validate what is required for our own well-being. And moreover, we are only one island in an archipelago of islands of similar history and culture, facing a world that is increasingly disinterested and unconcerned, rather than openly hostile, with the impact that their political-economic decisions have on our reality.

To face such a world successfully the region must come together as one political-economic entity. Survival outside the framework of such an entity is bleak, to say the least. And from an economic standpoint a market of 30 million will have more depth and sustainability than one of two or three million.

The only thing to fear is our own inability to break with traditional ways of seeing and doing things in this "hinterland".

An election is here again and the political parties are on the hustings. One would have thought major issues would be a vision for fundamental economic transformation based on an industrial policy that is regional in perspective, since we need each other for modern existence; also proposals for a new political culture involving constitutional remake, note "remake", rather than "reform".

Reform involves mere tinkering. Remake means exactly what the word suggests, tear up the "old" and hammer out a whole new arrangement of things, a whole new system of social relationships. The view is that all the old relationships have broken down and are anachronistic.

The relationship between leadership and led, party and membership, union and membership, teacher and pupil, parents and children, church and State, etc, all have to be re-examined and tailored to suit the times and the new consciousness that pervades, the new consciousness that demands that all the people be empowered.

It is a total breakdown that has taken place. That is why this sense of lawlessness is everywhere, that is why the society appears to be disordered and ungovernable, moreso on the East/ West Corridor, where the density of population is highest and the sense of hopelessness most acute.

How are we then to view this present scenario in which the regime in power and its apologists seem hell-bent on minimising the debate and confining the "political" discourse to the performance of road-paving without engineering and schoolbooks in schoolbags and pensions for the elderly. But not one single iota on how we are to view the world and how we are to challenge ourselves to engage the future.

It is this regime's inability to raise the level of political discourse that will eventually bring about its demise. As a matter of fact the only reason why it has lasted so long, ie nine months, is because of the culture of public servants and their continued desire to maintain their oath of confidentiality. There are top public servants everywhere throughout the service who have been steadfast in holding their tongues.

We said elsewhere: "... our story is the story of the 'hinterland', the outposts and frontier towns in which the nature and character of enraged speculators, greedy, hoarding, insecure commissioners, traders and transient settlers have left their indelible mark, and would have long since destroyed any semblance of society here, but for the civility of clerks..." and their bureaucratic upholding of convention, so detested by the nouveau riche, and the bungling, awkward entrepreneurs and common, feisty hustlers, who storm the city and citadels like bulls in a china-shop.