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The official and unsurprising collapse of the proposed Dragon gas and related Venezuelan gas supply arrangements, three weeks before the next General Election, should in normal circumstances cost the incumbent Peoples’ National Movement (PNM) the election.
However, we have an Opposition, the United National Congress (the UNC), led by Kamla Persad Bissessar (Kamla) who, after her initial success in 2010, has led her party into several subsequent defeats at the polls.
Photo: UNC.
The electorate will have to swallow hard to re-consider its distaste for Kamla and some of her front-line members of Parliament. It is uncertain whether it will do so.
Perhaps the exposure of the weakness of the proposed gas supply arrangement in the face of US sanctions—in combination with disgust at former PNM Prime Minister Dr Rowley’s cheerful acceptance of hefty increased retirement benefits before he resigned his office and the ill-temper with which he treated us throughout his term—will drive the electorate to reconsider Kamla and her band of candidates.
Those retirement benefits in people’s face for real.
It is not the mere collapse of the PNM’s touted centrepiece to relieve severe, crippling gas supply curtailment in the energy sector that is offensive. It is the Government’s relentless “none shall dare question it” approach, the abuse of those who nevertheless had the temerity to do so, the recklessness of apparently not having a fallback position—even though it was notorious how volatile relations between the United States and Venezuela were.
(Photo: OPM.)
Anthony Paul, energy sector consultant, businessman and commentator—who is as much a bona fide citizen as those politicians who abused him—recently summarised the notorious volatility. He also startlingly stated in respect of our dealings with Venezuela to obtain a gas supply that “they were not as they were messaged to be”.
Paul commented: “What it brought immediately would have been some confidence that the economy had something to keep it afloat and growing potentially, but the reality is those were not as big and as impactive as they were messaged to be.”
(See Trinidad Express, 10 April 2025 headlined Guava season looming for T&T.)
Was this one of the features of the deals that the Government was protecting itself from exposure by abusing those trying to seek accountability?
As if the Government’s recalcitrance against challenge to the risk it was taking is not electorally poisonous enough, it is now apparently making an attempt to minimise the Dragon deal as “the project you see everybody focusing on and screaming about” and to tout instead the billions expected in the form of foreign direct investment (FDI) directly into our energy sector—“something”, said new Prime Minister Stuart Young, “that unfortunately, is not spread out there”.
(See the attempted comeback remarks of Prime Minister Young in the Trinidad Guardian, 12 April 2025.)
Put simply, in respect of the Dragon Gas and related matters, the incumbent Government has carried us to the lowest ebb of accountability. It must also be said that it did so with a cozy chorus of support from elite business organisations.
Photo: OPM.
Currently, the Energy Chamber of Trinidad and Tobago has admitted, that the recent revocation of the relevant US issued special licences was “not unexpected”. (See Trinidad Express 9 April 2025.)
Did these organisations, although they were well placed to do so, stimulate any challenge to the Government to think of an alternative to Dragon and make a fallback plan as US-Venezuela relations were visibly deteriorating?
Civic responsibility required them to leave the safety of the cocktail party crease. Did they also remain passive when their colleague Anthony Paul was being abused?
Photo: OPM.
Meanwhile there is dismay at the dysfunction of the current election campaigns. Meetings at which platform speakers shout insults and barely concealed expressions of hatred about their opponents are the norm.
Whatever may be set out in bulky manifestoes, there is a lack of articulation on the platforms of specific plans with which to deal with violent crime, the economy, the foreign exchange crisis, or to source the funding to deliver the arrays of benefits being promised.
How can reticence to raise material issues and deficient and unsavoury campaigns carry forward our little twin-island state currently in serious trouble?
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Martin G Daly SC is a prominent attorney-at-law. He is a former Independent Senator and past president of the Law Association of Trinidad and Tobago.
He is chairman of the Pat Bishop Foundation and a steelpan music enthusiast.
The PNM has always been the epitome representation of putting all one’s eggs in a single basket.
In other words, Mr. Daly, we are between a rock and a hard place.