Former finance minister Selby Wilson says he has every confidence that the PNM Government will adopt the correct posture in bringing back T&T to economic prosperity.
He was speaking yesterday about the challenging times the country was facing minutes after being awarded the Chaconia Gold Medal for his dedicated service to the nation by President Anthony Carmona at the President’s Office, St Ann’s.
Retired permanent secretary, Margaret Parillon, also received a Public Service Merit Award from Carmona. Both awardees said they felt humbled by the awards. Wilson and Parillon were unavailable for the last National Awards function.
As T&T goes through one of its toughest economic challenges due to falling oil and gas prices, Wilson said for the country to rebound, it would require astute management.
“We just have to ride out this challenging cycle,” he added.
Wilson said it was unfortunate that the country had built up recurrent expenditure at a time when money was in abundance.
“I have every confidence that the Government will adopt the correct posture eventually, in getting it right,” Wilson said. He said between 1986 to 1991 the country saw a lot of pain under the National Alliance for Reconstruction who introduced VAT and slashed Cost of Living Allowances.
“It was the correct thing to do at the time and we did restore the country to some semblance of economic prosperity,” he added.
In retrospect Wilson said: “This country has not reaped the benefits of value for money in all its expenditure... whether it is in projects or education. We spent a lot of money but we have not got commensurate results.”
On a positive note, Wilson said he expected benefits to be derived from the recent trade-offs with Venezuela. While he expressed concerns about the state of the economy, Wilson said what was more troubling was crime and country’s social decay.
“I think that is more a difficult problem to deal with than the cycles of economic misfortunes. I am very concerned about the crime situation and general decay in the society. That is always a difficult preposition... how rapidly you can put that under control,” he added. He said the Government needed to come up with a plan to reverse this situation.
“Maybe the wealth in the country has contributed to levels of crime that were unprecedented,” he noted.
Wilson said people probably have the perception that leadership at all levels was serving themselves and not the country’s interest.
“If that is so, we’ve got to be aware of that kind of knock-on effect,” he added.