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LatinNews Daily - 8 September 2015

Opposition wins in Trinidad & Tobago

Development: Preliminary results indicate that the main opposition People’s National Movement (PNM) led by Keith Rowley won the 7 September general election in Trinidad & Tobago, defeating the coalition People’s Partnership (PP) of Prime Minister Kamla Persad Bissessar, in office since 2010.

Significance: While final pre-electoral surveys had suggested an increasingly tight race, potentially to be determined by a single seat in the 41-seat House of Representatives, preliminary figures suggest that the PNM has won 22 or 23 seats, with the remainder going to the PP (comprising the United National Congress [UNC], the Congress of the People [COP], the Tobago Organization of the People [TOP], and the National Joint Action Committee [NJAC]). The PP took office with 29 seats in 2010. While Persad Bissessar herself has remained popular, the PP failed to fend off corruption allegations, citizen concerns about crime and the impact of the recent economic slowdown.

  • While Persad Bissessar easily won her Siparia seat, according to local media reports government ministers including Roger Samuels (National Diversity and Social Integration), the attorney general, Garvin Nicholas, and the former president of the senate, Raziah Ahmed, were not so lucky.
  • Another notable loser was the leader of the Independent Liberal Party (ILP), Jack Warner, a former PP government minister but now a bitter opponent of the Persad Bissessar administration, who faces extradition to the US on multiple charges of corruption relating to his former roles as FIFA vice president and head of the Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football (CONCACAF). Warner’s ILP lost its bid in all the seats it contested.
  • Aside from various public corruption scandals – which in early 2015 cost the jobs of the previous attorney general, Anand Ramlogan, and the national security minister, Gary Griffith – the PP government was also punished by voters for its failure to address crime in the country. According to the PNM manifesto, “the murder total has exceeded 400 for the last two years and there has been no reduction in the murder rate for this year, with over 250 murders in the first 7 months of 2015.” The PNM is promising to “move swiftly to rebuild our Coast Guard, restore confidence in the armed forces and protective services, and reconstruct our anti-gang, forensic, and criminal surveillance systems.”
  • Another problem for the current government has been the economy, which remains heavily reliant on the oil and gas-sector. Real annual GDP growth was just 0.9% in 2014, down from 1.7% in 2013 and 1.4% in 2012, according to latest data from the United Nations’ Economic Commission on Latin America & the Caribbean (Eclac). The West Texas Intermediate (WTI) oil barrel, on which Trinidad & Tobago bases its budget calculations, was trading at just over US$45 a barrel yesterday. The original 2015 budget projections were based on a WTI average of US$80/b.
  • In late April, ratings agency Moody’s downgraded the government’s bond and issuer ratings to Baa2 from Baa1 and changed the outlook to negative from stable. It cited “persistent fiscal deficits and challenging prospects for fiscal reforms”, noting “recurring deficits of the order of 2-3% of GDP since 2009, after consecutive surpluses were observed over the previous eight years”, “limited economic diversification” in the context of falling oil prices and a “weak macroeconomic policy framework.”
  • Rowley and the PNM say it will be a priority to reverse this downgrade, pledging to “proactively addressing all of these areas of economic weakness, which have been left unattended by the present Government”. While committing to continue with the “general lowering and harmonization of income tax rates that occurred during the PNM years…[which]…has proven to be effective in increasing revenues”, the PNM manifesto proposes to set up new institutions like a ‘Trinidad & Tobago Revenue Authority’, which would “institute more effective tax administration, by coordinating databases across Customs and Excise, VAT and Corporate and Individual Taxes”. It is also proposing to set up an ‘Economic Development Board’, tasked with steering dialogue with the government, the private sector and the labour movement “on the articulation of long term economic and social goals for the country”.

Looking Ahead: A political old-timer with various cabinet positions to his name (including the planning, housing and trade ministries), Rowley, who took over the PNM leadership in 2010, will make history as the second Tobago-born prime minister. Indicative of the need to address “officially sanctioned corruption”, as he describes it, Rowley is proposing as “an urgent priority” anti-corruption measures to end “the pernicious scourge of ‘political investors’”. Among these measures would be “appropriate campaign finance legislation”.

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