By Chantalé Fletcher
WHILE some companies are taking people to space, in Trinidad and Tobago a merit list to appoint a police commission cannot travel from President’s House to the Parliament.
This according to Opposition Senator Wade Mark during his contribution to the Budget debate in the Senate on Monday.
“Our economy depends heavily on foreign direct investment,” he said.
He questioned which foreign investor would want to inject capital into a country that can’t even select a commissioner of police?
Mark made reference to a company which took paying customers into space.
He said, “In other places, companies are taking persons to the edge of Earth’s atmosphere meanwhile in T&T, a merit list from the Police Service Commission (PolSC) cannot even travel from the President’s House to the Parliament.”
Mark asked, “Which foreign investor would want to invest money in a country where the chief lawmaker cannot draft the simplest of documents, much less to draft the complex financial and regulatory framework that foreign investors require to ensure protection on their investments?”
He said, “While they drive away in a luxury car, the people of our nation are left penniless on a road to nowhere. Whilst they enrich themselves, their families, friends and financers, they have placed Trinidad and Tobago on a road to a dead end.”
Mark said the most important measure that could have been introduced in the budget was “to tax the chief lawmaker on every case that he has lost and we should not have to worry about property tax after that, as with that money; we can buy everybody in the country a Porsche car.”
Mark said that people have lost faith in the country’s independent institutions.
“It is these institutions which underpin our prosperity by ensuring confidence in our economy,” he said.
Mark said, “The institutions no longer exist. We have no commissioner of police and we have no PolSC. We have an Attorney General’s office without competent leadership and an unknown public official that is a puppet master manipulating constitutional processes, and we have a President in which the standing orders do not permit me to impeach.”
He said, “Our economic problems do not exist in isolation, if investors and citizens have confidence in our institutions, then they would have no confidence in our economy.
“If investors think there is a political conspiracy to appoint a puppet COP, they would not invest for fear of political percussion, an if they aren’t convinced that this government has the political strength and will to remove the obvious source of incompetence from their ranks, they would not invest.”
Mark indicated a budget was not simply a proposal by the Government on how they intend to spent taxpayers’ money.
He said, “It was also an account for which monies have already been spent, but when it was time to account for how they spent tax payer’s money, many Government ministers including the Prime Minister suddenly was unable to do so.”
