By Raffique Shah
Sunday, October 12th 2008
I grew to dislike Budget presentations and the debates that followed them during my five short years as a parliamentarian. For most of that period, the then Prime Minister, Dr Eric Williams, was also Minister of Finance. Like most intellectuals who were also heads of governments in that era, Williams reveled in making lengthy presentations. Having a captive audience comprising 35 MPs, a number of senators and other high-ranking public officials who felt it was their duty to be present for the budget, Williams would drone on and on, sometimes for five, six hours.
Continue reading In Trinidad, the piper calls the tune
This talk was given to the VII Social Summit for Latin American and Caribbean Unit, via video feed. 
It is the height of irony that Government Senator Hazel Manning should be calling for parliamentary privilege to be reviewed. After all, it was her husband, Prime Minister Patrick Manning, who committed a most flagrant abuse of parliamentary privilege last week.
Prior to the commencement of the TT/Barbados Maritime Boundary Arbitration I wrote in March 2004 to former Minister of Foreign Affairs Knowlson Gift advising that T&T should hold immediate consultations with our Venezuelan treaty partner with respect to collaborating on the defence of the maritime boundary that they jointly established by treaty in 1990. Points 1 to 22 of the boundary are illustrated in the chart below.
With Ronald Reagan now dead and Margaret Thatcher barely alive, I shall resist the urge to blame this global financial crisis solely on them. In many ways, they cannot be blamed for today’s debacle. Some enterprises Thatcher divested should never have been state-owned: a trucking business (National Freight Corporation), 27 railway hotels, carmakers Jaguar and Rolls-Royce. Why would any government engage in such ventures?
DEBATES in Parliament are supposed to be about the interests of those who put Members of Parliament there, not to hurl scandalous allegations at individuals in and out of Parliament. In this regard, there is another aspect of Prime Minister Manning’s parliamentary behaviour that needs noting.
On what basis can PM Manning justify spending an astronomical $503m (one percent of the 2009 budget that is equivalent to the sum for the construction of the Tobago power plant) to host the Summits of the Americas and the Commonwealth in 2009 if not to boost his already inflated ego? What diplomatic goodwill and political and economic benefits will accrue to the pauperized people of T&T from hosting these Conferences when we are burdened with a poverty rate of 27%? The poverty gap is widening and pensioners on fixed incomes are ketching their “nennen”.
It’s the kind of story that would get a cat vex or make a donkey want to commit murder. Imagine a young, imaginative entrepreneur, someone who does not possess a “gimme-gimme” mentality, comes into town and tells the world that he will build an empire that would make anything Sat Maharaj ever dreamed of doing look like a doll’s house. He starts a credit union and offers interest rates unlike anything the nation has ever heard; at least, not since the days of International Trust when my mother got burned because of her greed. People began to invest in this credit union and before you could say Pan-Dey it was the hottest thing in town.