Newsday Editorial
Monday, August 4 2008
Does the Government understand the difference between luxuries and necessities? It does not seem so, if comments made earlier this week by Finance Minister Karen Nunez-Tesheira are any indication.
Admitting that Government spending has contributed to double-digit inflation, Ms Nunez-Tesheira nonetheless insisted that the expenditure was a “necessary investment”. But Government’s main contribution to the spiralling inflation rate has been through its construction programme, and most of these projects cannot be considered investments in any real sense. The $148 million spent on the still incomplete Prime Minister’s residence and Diplomatic Centre certainly pays no returns, and was entirely unnecessary. The building of a Government campus and Social Affairs tower and an Education Ministry edifice cannot be defined as investments, either. Even if we accept Prime Minister Patrick Manning’s argument that the public servants who will work in these buildings will be more productive because of the comfort of their workspace, we very much doubt they will be productive to the tune of billions of dollars.
Continue reading Difference between needs and wants
I yearn for the day when I can look at the front page of any T&T newspaper and see headlines that are not crime related. Unfortunately, I cannot hold my breath until hell freezes over or for the incumbent government to realize that there is a direct correlation between poverty and crime.
AS many of my African brethren gathered over the past week to mark Emancipation Day, I reflected on just how emancipated we are. And I don’t mean just Afro-Trinis, I mean all of us who form the melting pot that is Trinidad and Tobago. I started this column by noting that many among the Afro-Diaspora would mark emancipation. Not all. Far from it, the majority of those who descended from the most barbaric form of slavery known to mankind are not even aware that their forebears were brought here (and elsewhere in the West) against their will, in shackles, in the most inhumane conditions.
FAR from being seen as the saviour in the mess that is now the collapse of the Hindu Credit Union, the Government action last week must rightly be classified as having come too little too late.