DR WAYNE KUBLALSINGH
IN HIS press conference on July 2, the Prime Minister attempted to create an impression of himself as a man close to the heartbeat of global goings-on, thoughtfully and gallantly looking after the developmental interest of the republic. There is nothing further from reality. This remote, hands-off leadership is deluded, fanciful and farcical to the extreme.
Dr Rowley, and successive governments, has left the nation in a developmental mess, and he himself has been the biggest blunderer, a wrecker of the nation's development business. Rowley's actions over the years show that he has little grasp of national development, and having miserably failed on this score locally, is making out that he is some kind of global development arbiter or diplomat.
Food security
Rowley went to Guyana: To talk to Guyanese and other Caricom leaders. To give support to a large-scale Caricom project. To use the ample lands of Guyana to produce wheat, corn, rice, all manner of grain and meat, which economies of scale dictate that we may not produce singly. But Rowley and the PNM government were given such an opportunity before. And they flunked out. Went for something else, which busted, caused the loss of scores of millions.
In 2002, working with 40 development experts at the University of the West Indies, I produced the Caroni Position Paper, giving a detailed plan showing how the 77,000 acres of Caroni (1975) Ltd lands, infrastructure, resources could be used to lever and diversify the economic fortunes of the nation.
I presented it to the agriculture minister. He requested 12 more copies. Instalments of it were serialised in a newspaper. But the government had more serious business - smelter, the Master Gas Plan of 2002, 14 heavy gas-based industrial estates, ports and industries. A rare opportunity, coherent large-scale planning, missed; the lands, resources of this company dissipated, marooned, disseminated in bits and pieces.
Rowley boasted before the last general election that he owned a farmer's badge and would convert the entire eastern seaboard of Trinidad into an agricultural belt.
Energy
In his press conference, Rowley touted himself as the guardian of our energy security. Why did the 2002 government reject the Caroni Position Paper? It had gas-based projects on its plate, it said.
Rowley had gone up and down this country, platform after platform, gospelling smelter. But we had no gas for this Gaffney and Cline Master Plan. Geotechnical studies, the hapless clearance of land in La Brea, the shutdown of silo and port, legal, administrative, publicity costs, the cost to the Chinese who had already come, brought machinery, built housing, wasted scores of millions of dollars.
Despite the earnest entreaties of the OWTU leadership, members of the Petrotrin board, myself and others, Rowley made the decision to mothball our oil refinery. I had made the point that in the event of war
