No real Politics in the
The budget statement presented by Chief Secretary Orville London on June 25 this year contains fairly clear statements of how his PNM executive council intends to develop Tobago in the fiscal year 2001/2002, but it is practically devoid of real politics.
Tobago PNM’s first Budget
It is the Tobago PNM’s first budget statement, one that comes after more than 20 years of unbroken DAC/NAR governance of Tobago during which the politics of Tobagonian nationalism was preached (and embraced by a majority of Tobagonians), especially in the Hochoy Charles years, and one would have thought that the PNM would have seized the opportunity to promote that nationalism since it is uncontroversial that Charles lost out, not because of his nationalistic fervour, but because of his financial adventurism and his absurd attempt at Doctor Politics. Instead, one finds a conscientious refusal to ruffle political feathers in the central government, an absence of the fighting spirit, a quiet appropriation of Charles’ major victory in his term of office, and the shameless rhetoric of mamaguy.
It is clear that the PNM did not grasp the NAR’s baton of negotiable nationalism but picked up its own weather-worn baton of acquiescent accommodation where it fell a quarter of a century or so ago.
To give you a sense of the PNM capitulation, opportunism, and deception, I will report on what the budget statement’s theme is, what ideas the statement itself begins with, what ideas it ends with, and how those ideas will be funded into realisation. The theme is ‘Developing Tobagonians in a developing Tobago’, and the statement begins with a vision composed of the notions of equity, sustainability, and empowerment.
Equity is defined as ‘equitable access to opportunities’, sustainability as, minimally, the next generation (of Tobagonians) enjoying ‘an enhanced well-being compared to our own’, and productivity as Tobagonians achieving their maximum potential by the executive council investing in people and creating an enabling environment. Empowerment is the product of a combination of equity, sustainability, and productivity.
These four processes/conditions will be effected/achieved by more careful management of the budgetary allocations sought from the central government in Port of Spain. The expected transfer from the national budget is TT$1.1B, calculated using a percentage of the national budget within the 4.03% to 6.09% recommended by the Dispute Resolution Commission that was appealed to by Charles (too late), but without any absolute national budget figure given. London promotes his council as being better, more rational, and more prone to accountability than Charles and his council were in their selection of development projects and their management of the funds to be donored.
(It is interesting to note that, quite apart from their sense of being better and more accountable money managers, the PNM in opposition accused Charles of asking for too much when he came up with his unprecedentedly big budgets and, in particular, when he based his last budget on the 6.09 rate, the higher end of the Dispute Resolution Committee recommendation.)
London’s budget statement ends with the notions of 1) Tobagonians positioning themselves to exploit every opportunity and opening, 2) accountability for every penny donored (in particular, ‘no Ringbangs, no ADDAs, and no Granadillas’, 3) need for development of a 30- or 40-year vision for Tobago, and 4) ‘seiz[ing] the opportunity to take control of our destiny’. These can only be tied to his introductory ideas of equity, sustainability, productivity, and empowerment, as well as to his billion-dollar plan to fund them. In other words, we can only think that the various projects – for education, health, agriculture, tourism, etc. – outlined in the statement will achieve Tobagonian empowerment, strategic Tobagonian self-positioning for exploitation of opportunity, Tobagonian taking control of their destiny, etc.
But how, it must be asked, can these processes/conditions be effected/achieved by a plan that is based simply on better, more accountable consumption of funds donored by Port of Spain? How, for instance, can a people seize control of their destiny via waiting for another people to send money to them, which money neither is intended to be invested for the creation of wealth at the macro level of governance nor will be supplemented (from what is specified in the statement) by internal revenues? I am not hereby disparaging the plans for education, agriculture, etc.. What I am criticising is the total absence in the statement of a) any notion of autonomy in the raising and generation of development capital, b) plans for the creation of structures for such an autonomy, c) the politics by which such autonomy will be achieved.
There seems to be a clear contradiction between the goals of empowerment and control of destiny, on the one hand, and a lack of control over matters like budget funding and revenue generation, on the other.
It is far from clear to me how a people can ‘seize the opportunity to take control of [their] destiny’ in a situation of lack of control over their income and expenditure in the sense suggested above. It is amazing that they should be fed the rhetoric that they can take control of that destiny, especially after a history of resistance by Port of Spain, most recently demonstrated in Hochoy Charles’ term of office, to any attempt by Tobago to achieve control of its finances and its investment strategies for wealth creation.
The PNM has chosen to accommodate the history, but it must not mamaguy us with empty rhetoric.
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