Get on with the agenda

By Bukka Rennie
September 03, 2003

The point made in the last column is simply that we must come to be quite aware of what we in fact have accomplished in the past so as to be better equipped to deal with the challenges of the future. The worst response would be if we were to accept the mindless twaddle that seeks to suggest we are impotent and clueless as to what is necessary and what has to be obtained for the future.

Development is a process, not an event. There is no blueprint. It is not a question of direct linear progression. Mistakes are made and, in some things, we seem to come a full circle, "back to square one", so to speak, but every other "square one" poses new points of vantage, new insights and embodies new dimensions. And so over a period of time there emerges a certain logic to what is attempted and what has been accomplished.

The last column indicated how after the political independence from Britain in 1962, T&T joined the modern world as an economically-dependent State which quickly was forced by developing circumstances, particularly pressure from below, to nationalise the "commanding heights" of the economy, the then jargon, and to work out partnership arrangements with foreign investors.

We always knew who really controlled this landscape. We always knew where real power lay. We always knew where strategic economic planning for our society was, and still is, located. Being probably the foremost creatures of global capital we always knew that our ruling class was an absentee class both in terms of geography and physiology, yet a class with which we have to negotiate and which eventually we will have to bring to heel.

Yet when the wheel of circumstance turned once again and there came the demand to revert to privatisation as paramount, we did not re-engage the privateering of past centuries nor that of pre-independence times, nor even that of the mid-'60s and early '70s; our new point of vision and vantage provided for us a mechanism of divestment, the Unit Trust, through which every common man and woman may share as unitholders.

If we, the whole people of T&T, do not know why we did this, then we will never come to know the most significant quality about who and what we are.

And by dint of the very same logic, is it any surprise that the largest and most lucrative local private corporation built here was developed on mutual funds, ie Clico?

Cyril Duprey rode a bicycle and sold insurance to people throughout this country. This black businessman organised the Penny Bank, teaching local working-class people to save and was the first to provide them with mortgages to purchase or to renovate their homes.

What he did was as significant as the "Grameen Bank" of Bangladesh that thought people how to take up their beds and walk inch by inch, once seed funds were provided in small manageable quantity.

Duprey by his life's work provided for us another frame of reference different to the normal Western understanding of "development". Today, that Clico initiative has taken us to the point where an entirely indigenous home-grown company stands on the threshold of being a truly global entity, a local multinational corporation. Where pray tell lies this national impotence of which we hear so much?

And we are yet to talk about the Dr Ken Julien initiatives! Listen to what we said in a piece titled "Building a home economy" back in August 1995:

...We said before that if our major resource today is natural gas then it behoves the powers that be to outline a strategy to exploit this resource in the interest of the entire nation. If this country possessed just an iota of common decency, and as a nation was not so mean, vulgar and spiteful, Dr Ken Julien would be in fact a much celebrated visionary...

"He pioneered the move to utilise natural gas to fuel our petrochemical industrialisation, envisaged the Point Lisas estate development as pivotal in conjunction with La Brea and Point Fortin, and designed the NGC to be a kind of national trust holding operation through which all the gas is collected and distributed first and foremost as fuel stock for the production of electricity, steel and petrochemicals...

"The specially attractive price of gas is offered as the major item in a package to induce foreign investors. By the turn of the century it is expected that foreign investments in the energy and petrochemical sector should total in the vicinity of some US$10 billion. Already we boast about being one of the world's largest exporters of ammonia and methanol. But absolutely nothing new has happened since the Ken Julien initiatives...

"Yet these initiatives could only be a first stage in the process of our development strategy.

The fact that Dr Julien has been honoured at our 41st Independence anniversary with the Trinity Cross, the nation's highest award, for his leadership contribution to national economic development, is in fact a significant signal. And some little pipsqueak of a lawyer somewhere has had the audacity to question this award. Again indicative of the vulgar spitefulness of which we spoke back in 1995.

Thankfully, there are young turks, local professionals in the energy sector and in the ministry following in the tradition of Legall and Boopsingh, who are already devising new paths forward seeking, in the first instance, to extract greater percentages of rents from the foreign-based MNCs, then to garner gradually widespread local capital investments in key areas of the energy sector, and further on to seek to harness control and strategic planning at home.

The Labdico contract to build drilling barges and platforms for the MNCs is, in fact, another much welcomed signal. The aim is to eventually inculcate the expertise to manage and control the energy sector from the bottom to the top. And if there is excess liquidity in the system then it stands to reason that the State will need to engage the essential fiscal policies to suck up this liquidity for capital investments in strategic areas, eg the IT industries that can provide the needed expertise required to function in this modern world.

At the same time, the manufacturing sector stands in dire need of great capital injection to diversify our industrial base and broaden and deepen our domestic market.

One was amazed at the extent of Colombia's manufacturing sector and the creative inventions exhibited at the recent trade fair they mounted at the convention centre. We can only wonder at the results that will come when we get serious with this sector and seek to link it directly with the energy and petrochemical sector.

The mechanisms of the Unit Trust and NEL already exist through which such investments can be channelled and, of course, locally based corporations like Clico Investments Ltd can be encouraged by way of such capital investments to do what they are doing faster and more effectively than they are doing at the moment.

We are the centre of our world, that is the view, and so we and only we must choose the options and make the decisions.

The key missing link to the establishing of a truly integrated home-oriented economy is the bringing of the agricultural sector into the modern world. The closing of Caroni has opened up a whole new vista for modernising agriculture and integrating it with the rest of the home economy. No new work is required. All the necessary work has been done.

Deceased Dr George Sammy showed us numerous new directions including how to tin crab and callaloo. Dr Spence is quite right, there are numerous books on soil surveys detailing soil type for every inch of earth in T&T, so all that is required is the vesting of Caroni lands in the State, which will then take the responsibility to guide people into the realms of modern mechanised farming of crops as diverse as possible and which can provide raw materials to our own manufacturing sector. In this day and age only that will suffice.

The hoe and cutlass days are gone forever. So, too, the plantation relationships. The children of Caroni will demand nothing less.

Once again it is not a matter of clueless impotence but rather a matter of not knowing our own history and what we have already accomplished as part of the Caribbean civilisation.