Trinidad and Tobago has a public policy disease. As a result, the economy is not being pushed in the direction of exporting the products of the high-productivity industries. One reason is that it does not make policies based on full information and communication. Eight months have fully passed without any sign of the institutional reforms needed to cure the disease, eliminate authoritarianism, and boost state entrepreneurship. The entire state apparatus of the government collective remains unchanged.
How, therefore, can we cure the disease? What design of government can deliver the necessary future without the errors of the past? The basic answer is empowerment of the people to participate in the information-sharing and communication process that would lead to the extermination of the disease.
The participation requires a new type of government that has three features: i) an effective system of oversight of executive activity; ii) a sharp improvement in the entrepreneurial capacity of the State; and iii) fair access to development opportunities all across the country.
First, let’s discuss legislative oversight. It is needed to ensure that the collective goals are really met. The legislature, outside of executive control, must play the main role in shaping government spending and related procurement, and it must do so by enacting laws and regulations, controlling the budget, and monitoring executive agencies to ensure that, in their operations, they are transparent, efficient, and accountable. In so doing, they would create value, especially development value, for public money.
To make progress, we need a component of the legislature outside of the executive to make laws that effectively define the purposes for which money may be spent, adjust funding levels for specific programmes, and prohibit expenditures as desired. That way, that component of the legislature could exercise significant and effective responsibility for, and control over, executive agency activities and their spending decisions.
In practice, this amounts to the introduction of a legislature with oversight capacity embedded in an extensive committee system. That way, the legislature could hold hearings and conduct investigations to review how public agencies, programmes, and activities are monitored, evaluated, and supervised. This includes examining past failures, current policies, and ways to improve the contracting, procurement, and spending processes.
The current legislature would thereby be redesigned to enable active and continuous monitoring and review of the development and implementation of the law and related rules for executive agency functioning, including procurement and auditing. For this to work, senior executives in offices established by legislation and the constitution should be nominated by current arrangements, but must be confirmed by an elected Senate. The latter should be designed primarily to protect minority rights and ensure equitable access to development opportunities. Further, the senior executives should be required to testify frequently before the legislature, House and Senate, on pending legislative proposals and on spending and procurement issues.
The legislative oversight activities must be designed to promote the accountability and transparency intended by legislation, and thus to prevent waste, fraud, and abuse, and ensure that the government receives the best value for expenditure of public funds. To that end, the legislature should be able to leverage support systems and expert personnel, like budget analysts and the auditor general, to conduct audits and reviews of procurement and spending processes and report findings to help identify areas for improvement and compliance through the lawmaking process.
Both Tobago and Trinidad need a well-designed legislature that would be able to steer the procurement and spending processes towards achieving broader public policy goals, with primary focus on promoting development, growing revenues, and growing foreign exchange supplies, but also with adequate attention to matters such as fairness, promotion of the participation of small businesses, and enforcement of sensible local-content requirements.
Additionally, a well-designed legislature would also be able to oversee how public agencies implement the law to achieve these objectives.
What about the parliamentary arithmetic that would enable effective oversight? An upper limit must be set on the size of the Cabinet – say, 15 members. Then, we could multiply that limit by six and add one to get the minimum size of the House of Representatives – in this case, 91. That arithmetic would allow a winning majority of at least 46. From these calculations, at least 31 members could go to the House purely to make law and run the supporting oversight process. This is what would make effective oversight possible, ensure transparency and accountability alongside popular empowerment, and deliver value from public spending.
The same principle should apply to Tobago. If the executive council is restricted to eight, then the maximum size of the THA would be 49, with a minimum governing majority of 25 and 17 specialist legislators responsible for the oversight process.
The second feature of the new government we will discuss is the need for a sharp improvement in the entrepreneurial capacity of the State. This is where community empowerment comes in. The authoritarian state works with limited information about the social and economic processes at work. Effective profit-making entrepreneurship is not possible under those conditions. By contrast, communities are inclusive. They work with full information. They can easily differentiate themselves flexibly as profitable safe zones and vibrant elements of the entrepreneurial state.
As social networks, communities possess or can develop certain competitive advantages. They are comparatively small, inclusive, close-knit socially, and nimble decision-making units. They are typically highly diverse relative to size but thrive on building identity and trust. They cultivate a global entrepreneurial mindset through diaspora. All of these attributes enable full integration of teaching, learning, and cultural influences into on-the-job education and skill-intensive accelerated training processes.
Effective entrepreneurship is possible in such a framework.
(Next Sunday, we will complete the discussion on ii and proceed to the discussion of iii.)
Winford James is a retired UWI lecturer who has been analysing issues in education, language, development, and politics in Trinidad and Tobago and the wider Caribbean on radio and TV since the 1970s. He has also written thousands of columns for all the major newspapers in the country. He can be reached at jaywinster@gmail.com.
