Contact Magazine April 2018

transforming t&T
It starts right
here, with you
Enough talk, enough evasion. It’s time to
get serious about change
WORDS By: jonathan charles
PHOTOGRAPHY courtesy: trinidad express newspaper
“
Change is something we always say, / but every time we change things
remain the same way,” sang the 2018 Calypso Monarch to the Savannah
crowds back in February. “It won’t change despite all we do / if change
doesn’t start with you.”
It wasn’t a new message that Helon Francis was delivering. But the idea that
each listener must become an agent of change was something of a novelty. Usually
it’s the government which is supposed to change, or the opposition, or the business
community. Someone else, anyway.
But no matter who is urged to change, things have so far stayed the same.
On the website of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) there is a scholarly
paper which makes this point. Entitled “Diversification in T&T: Waiting for Godot?”
(Khadan & Ruprah 2016). It refers mischievously to the 1953 Samuel Beckett play
Waiting for Godot, in which two loquacious Irish vagrants wait for a mysterious
saviour called Godot who never arrives. “Let’s go,” says one. “We can’t,” says the
other. “Why not?” “We’re waiting for Godot.”
So maybe Godot will come. Maybe the price of oil will get back to US$100.
Perhaps the deepwater blocks will be teeming with recoverable resources. Perhaps
Venezuelan gas will help us out. Perhaps everyone will start living within their
means. But Godot never seems to turn up.
In the world of economics, this seems to be quite a common view of Trinidad
and Tobago’s progress in diversifying its economy. Another post on the same IDB site
(Khadan 2016) says bluntly that “diversification away from the energy sector has
largely failed”. It puts much of the blame, controversially, on “Dutch disease”: “the
Trinidad and Tobago dollar has been consistently and substantially overvalued”. It
might as well have blamed national complacency.
18
Trinidad
and Tobago Chamber
of Industry and Commerce
www.chamber.org.tt/contact-magazine