In less than 14 months, 67 in­di­vid­u­als on State boards or in pub­lic of­fices have ei­ther left their po­si­tions, been fired or been placed on ad­min­is­tra­tive leave.

A ma­jor de­vel­op­ment for T&T NGL Ltd (TTNGL) dur­ing the first half of 2026 was the re­turn of cap­i­tal to share­hold­ers through a spe­cial div­i­dend pro­gramme that gave in­vestors the op­tion of re­ceiv­ing pay­ments in ei­ther lo­cal or US dol­lars.

There was a time when prepar­ing a na­tion­al team meant get­ting the play­ers to­geth­er, mak­ing sure the uni­forms were packed, sort­ing out the trav­el, and then fo­cus­ing al­most en­tire­ly on what was go­ing to hap­pen once the whis­tle blew.

“For I am per­suad­ed, that nei­ther death, nor life, nor an­gels, nor prin­ci­pal­i­ties, nor pow­ers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any oth­er crea­ture, shall be able to sep­a­rate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Je­sus our Lord.” (Ro­mans 8:38 &39)

Last week, we in­vit­ed the read­er to con­sid­er the State­ment of Case which gave rise to the Dis­pute Res­o­lu­tion Com­mis­sion. We end­ed by ask­ing the ques­tion that has hov­ered over the Com­mis­sion’s work for more than two decades: how did the fis­cal rea­son­ing sur­round­ing To­ba­go move from a pop­u­la­tion-based start­ing point of 4.03 per cent to an up­per bound­ary of 6.9 per cent? The doc­u­ments as­sem­bled around the case re­veal that To­ba­go’s claim rest­ed up­on a de­vel­oped fis­cal ar­chi­tec­ture. Re­cur­rent needs, de­vel­op­ment re­quire­ments, lo­cal­ly gen­er­at­ed rev­enue, pre­dictable na­tion­al trans­fers, bor­row­ing ca­pac­i­ty, and debt sus­tain­abil­i­ty were treat­ed as parts of one eco­nom­ic sys­tem. The per­cent­ages must there­fore be read against that larg­er in­tel­lec­tu­al frame­work.