Part I

Jack Warner says that the Prime Minister is the leader of contradictions. If he is, the recent behaviour of some of his flock, ministerial and other, suggests they are treading slavishly in his footprints. Contradictions aplenty, and I would add faux pas. Let’s look at some examples.

UDeCoTT, a company wholly owned by the state, seeks judicial review of the work, indeed the existence, of the Commission of Inquiry established by the very state of which it is a creature. This article is being written before the oral hearing to determine whether the company will be granted interim relief, and I shall therefore refrain from comment. I will only permit myself to wonder, like many others, where a state enterprise finds the fortitude to mount such a challenge. I don’t need to ask where it finds the money.

Then there’s our Minister of Finance. In her 2010 budget speech on September 7 she said that the government proposed ’to collaborate with the Government of Dominica to investing (sic) in quarrying facilities in that country.’ It was a position first articulated by the Prime Minister in his statement to Parliament last June 24. However, the Minister’s reference to it appears to have taken her colleague the Energy Minister, who is the one responsible for quarries, entirely by surprise.

It wasn’t only on quarrying and aggregate that the two Ministers publicly parted company. On September 17 Mrs Nunez-Tesheira (with puzzling aplomb, seeing that the relevant draft legislation has not yet been placed before Parliament) declared that the Government expected to collect $250m. in the short term and $750m in the medium term from the unpopular and clearly inequitable property tax.

Not so, said the dour Mr Enill a week later. No ’billion-dollar activity (was) taking place’, he stressed ’for the record’; in reality the Government expected the tax to yield only $72m., a reduction from the $85m figure for 2004. From $750m to $72m? And why in any case would you introduce a measure that gives you less revenue than you have been receiving? Enill has since issued a mea culpa. According to him, the true amount-it is also ’for the record’-is now $325m. Some record.

The Finance Minister also revived the curious prime ministerial idea of an aircraft maintenance facility in Grenada. Caribbean Airlines (CA), she said, was ’reviewing the possibility of expanding its business into aircraft maintenance services since this industry had proven to be a tremendous success under BWIA.’ I’m glad to hear this Government say something positive about BWIA, but there’s more to the Minister’s words than this.

A little more than two weeks after she spoke, CA’s CEO announced that the airline had in fact been carrying out such services on its planes, in-house, since mid-2008, and planned to sell them to other airlines. I wonder where that leaves the government’s proposal for Grenada?

I wonder too how successive governments in this place manage so expertly to squander taxpayers’ money. BWIA used to do these service checks and repairs, but they were discontinued on the ground that they were not cost-effective. Now CA has brought them back, arguing that they are cost-effective. A correspondent, SK, wearily notes the stop-start process. ’(A)nother build-up of skills and facilities’ has begun, he writes in a recent letter to the Express. He goes on: ’It is ironic that over a billion dollars later, I hear the faint tinkle of a penny dropping.’ His hearing is more acute than mine. All I hear is the dull thud of wasteful government inconsistency and mismanagement falling heavily on taxpayers’ backs.

Shipbuilding and repair was another area addressed by the Finance Minister. ’The government envisions a world-class maritime cluster,’ she said, ’focusing on the development of ship maintenance, shipbuilding and maritime construction.’ Yet later in her speech she sets out the concept of ’procurement of a shipbuilding and maintenance facility in St Vincent and the Grenadines which may be used to service our naval assets ’ Would this proposed Vincentian facility- Manning had talked about it too in June-be in direct competition with the one ’envisioned’ for this country? Are our taxpayers’ funds to be used so cavalierly?

But on September 7 the Finance Minister was on a roll. Where tourism was concerned, she assured us that we had ’succeeded in maintaining (our) position as a preferred destination and (had) a good story to tell.’ A few minutes later, however, she was bemoaning the fact that ’international air arrivals in Tobago (had) declined by 47 per cent compared to the same period last year (and that) hotel and guesthouse occupancy rates in (the island) in June (were only about) 25 and 35 per cent respectively.’ Well, you can always maintain a decline, I suppose. Tobago is accustomed to that.

The Minister also told us that the Tobago Tourism Rolling Plan-no, no pun intended-would be implemented in fiscal 2010. You won’t believe this-actually, you probably will-but a tourism rolling plan for T&T was prepared in 2002. (There was a separate one for Northeast Tobago.) Eight long years later, the Minister promises ’implementation’. Of what, precisely?

And then hands are wrung over a decline.

But that is not all.