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[00:00:07]A nation mortgaged in silence. How a decade of concealment, secret debt, and a compliant media left Trinidad and Tobago's small businesses gasping, and what Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar's government is now doing to reverse the damage. An editorial by Anil Roberts. When the People's National Movement lost the general election on April 28th, 2025, it did not simply lose power. It lost the ability to keep hiding what it had done.

[00:00:36]Ministry by ministry, ledger by ledger, the true state of the national finances is now coming into view, and the picture that is emerging is not one of ordinary mismanagement. It is the portrait of a government that deliberately misled its citizens, manipulated its credit ratings, and borrowed against public assets in secret while its ministers, senators, and favored contractors enriched themselves at the Treasury's expense. The systematic destruction of the energy sector began with an act of political arrogance in 2017, when Prime Minister Keith Rowley and Stuart Young Small Pinard traveled to Houston to negotiate gas pricing with upstream producers and excluded the NGC chairman, Jerry Brooks, and his entire technical team from the table. Brooks, a highly credentialed professional, subsequently resigned. Then, in 2018, Rowley compounded the damage by shutting down Petrotrin, erasing at a stroke the country's refining capacity and the thousands of livelihoods that depended on it. What followed was unbroken economic carnage. Rig days fell by half.

[00:01:41]Point Lisas curtailed production. The NGC posted losses, and direct employment in the sector collapsed from over 20,000 workers to roughly 10,000. No new refinery was built. No serious foreign direct investment framework was ever established. The Forex crunch that strangled private businesses across the country was not an act of God. It was the foreseeable result of a government that killed the upstream, neglected the downstream, and then refused to tell the population what was happening. Among the most serious recent disclosures is the revelation that weeks before the election, the Rowley administration secured a 500 million US dollar bond from an American financial institution and structured the arrangement deliberately to keep it off the national balance sheet. The collateral pledged was public land. The entire waterfront development corridor the UNC government is now seeking to bring to investors.

[00:02:36]Those investors are discovering that the land is already encumbered by a creditor's lien. The population that owns it was never informed. Minister of Finance Dave Tan Koo will address the full scope of this arrangement in the forthcoming budget review, but the pattern it represents is already clear.

[00:02:53]Across every ministry, the PNM had stopped paying its bills, was borrowing monthly to cover public sector salaries, and was manufacturing false revenue figures not to deceive ordinary citizens alone, but to protect its credit rating and its capacity to keep borrowing. A country rated near triple A equivalent when Kamla Persad-Bissessar left office in September 2015 with 12.26 billion US dollars in reserves and a Heritage and Stabilization Fund of 6.8 billion US dollars had been reduced to BBB- and was trending unstable. That none of this was seriously reported, investigated, or front-paged by the majority of Trinidad and Tobago's media is a failure that deserves its own reckoning. Outlets that position themselves as news organizations spent years amplifying PNM talking points and refusing to ask the questions the numbers made obvious. The contract workers quietly dismissed while ministers proclaimed job security deserved better. So did the hairdresser whose walk-ins halved, the upholsterer stretching between jobs, and the electronics retailer whose floor traffic thinned as the Forex crunch drove up import costs and left consumers with nothing to spare. These are not anecdotes. They are the street level expression of a macroeconomic collapse that was years in the making and systematically obscured from public view. The United National Congress government, led by Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar, has moved with urgency to confront what it inherited. The Minister of Energy, Rudal Moonilal, is leading renegotiations of upstream gas contracts to secure more cross-border supply, restore Point Lisas industrial activity, and rebuild employment in the sector. The Ministry of Foreign and Caricom Affairs is pursuing the foreign direct investment partnerships that were effectively absent under Rowley. A national employment program is underway to restore the jobs the PNM quietly destroyed. The path will not be short.

[00:04:55]The damage accumulated over 10 years cannot be reversed in 12 months, but it begins, as all genuine recovery must, with an honest accounting of what was done, by whom, and at what cost to the people of this country. That accounting is now public. The rebuilding has begun.

[00:05:12]Better days are coming step by step we are building something stronger.

[00:05:17]UNC and proud.