2 weeks Ago
You would think that a serious allegation like “Kamla empty the Treasury” is something that can easily be proven with facts and data. But in the land of people who don’t like to think, the facts do not matter—especially to PNM supporters who get their news from the Finance Minister and the Prime Minister. Data from the Central Bank’s website would show that our cash reserves in 2014 were much higher than in 2010—and also higher than in 2016, 2017 and 2018.
But what does this matter to people who seemingly believe “ole talk” and unsubstantiated claims constitute a legitimate argument? When the Finance Minister can state that we only had money to run the country for three days—and people actually bought that crap—what good is it talking statistics with those people? Despite constantly preaching doom and gloom about an “empty Treasury”, this administration has, over the years, proven itself capable of finding hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on community restoration projects, paintings, renovations to buildings, and light bulbs. Now, political talking chickenheads in the media are telling us that the Finance Minister has our economy. The facts say otherwise—but, again, what do they matter? Our central government and public sector debt continues to climb, capital flight remains an issue, and our forex reserves have not shown any sign of improvement within the last eight years.
What indicators are therefore being used to determine that Minister Colm Imbert has successfully saved our economy? The only sign of prosperity that the Government keeps pointing to is our projected “economic growth”, but when you’re running constant budget deficits, economic growth is always going to occur. Spending boosts the economy. It’s the most basic school of thought that is being taught at secondary schools and The University of the West Indies.
But economics isn’t only confined to the old Keynesian model of economics that we’ve been miserably running this country on since 1956. The old model of spend, spend, spend and borrow, borrow, borrow does not work in the long run. It provides a temporary economic boost, but when spiralling debt and inflation catches up, then we’re only back to square one.
It doesn’t help that we continue to turn to oil and gas as our lone saviour despite a 51% decrease in energy reserves during the first three quarters of the year. Translating this to real terms, what this means is that the fiscal balance has declined from a surplus of $88 million to a deficit of $4 billion. At this point, an IMF structural loan may be on the way despite what the minister wants us to believe—and what he wants us to believe is that 2027 would be a year of a free flow of milk and honey when several oil and gas projects come on stream.
But that means nothing when every year the minister cannot get his stories straight on our deficit. Just imagine the absolute absurdity that was on display back in 2021, when the minister made a grand charge that our deficit would be reduced from $15 billion to $6 billion in the year of a freaking pandemic when the Heritage and Stabilisation Fund had to be constantly drawn from to keep the economy afloat. The minister then had to recall the claim and revise that figure to $12 billion.
Then, in the following year, perhaps for the first time in our history, a minister of finance began his budget presentation without presenting the previous year’s actual revenue, expenditure and deficit. There’s a huge chunk of data missing from our current account, but PNM supporters are running around telling everyone about this fantastic job that the minister has done. The pandemic presented the opportune moment to blame five years of wild spending and mismanagement on a virus.
We’ve had forex issues since 2016; we’ve had foreign companies leaving our shores; and the Heritage and Stabilisation Fund was being treated as a bank overdraft long before the pandemic. Are we now supposed to believe that not only have we “bounced back” from the challenges of 2016-2020, but we’ve also made a remarkable recovery from the lockdown of 2020-2022 that further exacerbated these issues? The web that the Minister of Finance has spun will ultimately catch up with him. Hopefully, it is him and his administration that gets tangled up in it, and not some other political party that has to clean up the cobwebs—as was the case in 1986, 1995 and 2010.
Jean-Claude Escalante Belmont.
