Tag Archives: governance

A little more than 33 months ago, before Ms Paula-Mae Weekes was elected president of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, she was at the top of her game serving in another jurisdiction.   Today she is publicly expressing her disappointment at the absence of good governance for the people …

It is easy to blame public servants’ ‘mistakes’ for an eight-month delay in appointing the Board of the Trinidad and Tobago Securities and Exchange Commission (TTSEC) as reported in a recent newspaper article.  Public servants have become the most recent whipping horse of a government whose inaction contributes to the …

I wrote recently about the startling decision of the government to reject the offer of Patriotic Energies and Technologies Limited (Patriotic) to acquire the Petrotrin oil refinery, which the government closed down. When the titular head of the Ministry of Energy, Senator Franklin Khan, announced the sudden rejection, he gave …

I can blame Covid-19 for feeling stuck, but that would not be entirely honest. That feeling of ‘stuck-ness’ has been happening for a while and Covid-19 has only made it more intense.  My observation of Parliament, via the Parliament Channel, often evokes the thought that I have heard this before; …

If we are interested in an equitable and just society, we have to be interested in governance which begins with having a shared vision of the future based on common values and aspirations.  Ideally, when citizens are engaged in developing that vision, they feel committed to its realisation. The last …

The reported threat posed to Trinidad and Tobago by the floating storage offshore vessel, the Nabarima, moored in nearby Venezuelan waters has been of concern for nearly two months. The Nabarima contains over one million barrels of crude oil, in storage on it. The vessels’ condition was reported on internationally …

Culture. It’s a fairly amorphous word; difficult to pin down to a simple meaning. Slippery to define, except perhaps by looking at various characteristics that have come to be associated with it. For me, it is essentially the way people live. That is big and broad and open to all …

What do Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley’s rebuke of the civil servants and the closure of Chaguanas’ MovieTowne have in common? Are these connected to the car tax exemptions furore? Why is there chatter about the foreign exchange rate and fear of liquidity and solvency for businesses and our government …

Confronted with social unrest shortly before the recent August General Election, Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley was forced to acknowledge that there were socio economic problems that need to be relieved. I remind readers that the promise to be kept now is that the government’s community recovery committee, chaired by …

This week had two apparently disconnected stories whose link we may not have discerned, but which profoundly affects our future. The first was the Express’ report on the alleged TT$549M EMBD bid rigging case which noted: ‘…some of the same contractors donated financially toward the current government…’ The second is …

The statement that Trinidadians are undisciplined has never sat comfortably with me. The statement insinuates that we are unable to carefully control the way we work, live, or behave, especially to achieve our goals. My intuition is that, as a people, we do what the system allows and whatever we …

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before,” Rahm Emanuel, (2008). The context for that quote—which is really a riff off one made by Paul Romer, who in …