Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley says the planned revamped Trinidad and Tobago Television (TTT) would be best served if it were run by the state.
He said this would stem the flow of millions of dollars down the drain as is the case now with State-owned Caribbean New Media Group (CNMG). He was speaking at the launch of Professor Hollis “Chalkdust” Liverpool’s book Thoughts Along the Kaiso Road at the UTT Campus at the National Academy for the Performing Arts (NAPA) in Port-of-Spain on Friday night.
Rowley said: “Only yesterday (Thursday) the Cabinet took a decision as we withdraw from competing in the media trying to compete with radio and television stations and competing with news.
“We have 25 or more private sector radio stations, a number of television stations we are competing against and wasting millions of dollars.
“We took a decision to make some adjustments to the state media but to recreate the television station TTT; T&T Television and to maintain and sustain it to provide an opportunity for the national culture, art, information and civilisation.”
He added: “We believe that TTT, open to the people of T&T telling the story of the people, is an entity that ought to be maintained by the state. So very soon we will relaunch TTT to allow us to grow in our own space. These are the kinds of things we are doing.”
He said with TTT, T&T’s civilisation in whatever form or fashion will always have a place to go and an entity to push what may not be the flavour of the day or may not be the bottom line with some of the commercial stations.
Rowley said after people like Liverpool put out learning steps in his book, they must now ensure that they become part of the reading material that the nation’s children are exposed to.
He said one of the issues the Government faced was that it was spending more and more money on education and getting less and less educated people in the country.
He said if an initiative was not launched to counter this, the situation can only get worse for each successive generation.
He said people needed to understand what was the standard of the yardstick by which education was judged.
Rowley said against the background of the absence of the people’s own story being written accurately, the Government had taken steps to bring a group of people together to do a research text of the history of the people of T&T, which was now completed.
He said this was done to prevent T&T’s history from being revised and “reviewed against agendas that might not be telling their own story” and that textbook was now available in all the nation’s schools.
Liverpool said with all Rowley’s problems with the sea bridge in Tobago and all the problems he was having, he (Liverpool) wanted to give the Prime Minister a copy of his book to read when he was crossing the sea bridge to calm him down and give him the power and resilience to face those challenges.
He lamented that some major corporations, media houses and universities were asking for just one or two copies of his book and some large conglomerates were using the excuse of the drop in oil prices as a reason for why they can’t buy a copy.
Liverpool said when most of his students wrote their papers he told them to not just quote from the works of Tennyson and Shakespeare but also calypsonians, as they had given us so many beautiful quotes.