Election, campaign, nation

We are now journeying to our 63rd year of Independence, and our final budget before the next general election.

The mood of Independence was not really celebratory this year. The future is hazy, the present tough. How likely is it that the Minister of Finance will offer an election budget designed to make people, who just don’t feel that good now, feel better in October? One can never be sure.

The reason people don’t feel so good now has to do with the economic, financial, personal safety, and political conditions of the immediate present. Life is hard, everything costs more, wages are not sufficient. And infrastructure is breaking down everywhere, service is of poor quality, and everything seems harder than it should be. Jobs are scarce.

Governance is callous, arbitrary; the climate of politics is vexatious and divorced from solutions that people want and need.

The killings just continue, every night, every day, anywhere! And, talk aside, no one has a plan to reduce gangsterism and ķillings, nor to ensure public safety. It may have taken us 62 years to get here, but here we are. The gap between leaders and citizens is so wide and getting to growth, recovery and citizen security with the same policies, extremely unlikely. How to live with this?

Does the 2025 budget really matter, then? How would this budget be different from the other nine, and, in any case, why would it be different in the first place? What difference could any budgetary action make at this point?

You may be thinking that I am being negative. No. It is not my nature. I try to see the good in things, in people, in events and circumstances. But it would be irrational not to acknowledge that things can be negative sometimes.

You see the problem with 62 years of Independence is that you can’t go back. You can’t undo anything. What is done is done. You can reflect on it, analyse it, make sense of it, learn from it, but the past is gone and the future is coming at you relentlessly. Whatever the future might offer, it meets you where you are. To leap to someplace more desirable, ahead, you have to make a harder effort and maybe exert a different kind of effort. Different and bigger, maybe even, bolder.

Will a government take such a leap in an election-year budget? Or will the focus be on a budget to win the election? The tragedy, of course, is that if the budget is meant to help you to win, that budget might be bad for the country in the long run. Why? Because what a government needs to do in the best interest of the country, might not be popular with the electorate. In other words, what needs to be done to govern responsibly and well, may cause uneasiness, resentment and a backlash.

So beyond the budget, in their election campaign, the Government might outline a perspective or plan, but it would also have to explain just how we will get there as a country and what we will be doing differently. Because the Government will be carrying ten years of incumbency baggage. A package of promises too disconnected from current reality could test credibility. Will they be believed?

What can the Opposition do? First of all, the last five years of Opposition performance cannot be erased. Secondly, none of the Opposition parties will pledge to continue PNM policies. They will campaign for change. On that there will be unity; beyond that unpredictability, volatility. But the Opposition saying that they are opposed to what the incumbent Government is doing or proposes to do, is not enough. The Opposition, in whatever form, will have to say what they will do and why; and what difference it will make. Or else what is the point, if those seeking to govern are devoid of solutions for a country in crisis?

It cannot be enough for the Opposition to respond to the budget alone either. It must indicate what its own policies would achieve over the next five years that would make 2030 seem like a credible quantum leap from 2024. And that means the Opposition must display a realistic understanding of where Trinidad and Tobago is now, and what we need to do, with visibly competent, credible ministerial material, to get out of this rot and advance as a country and people to safety, security and shared prosperity.

People want solutions. They are not seeing any. And if no political party has solutions, then the electorate has no real options and therefore no choice. Whatever little enthusiasm exists, will be curbed.

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