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