Tightening… T&T cooperation

Last Friday, our peripatetic President Irfaan Ali – along with a host of his Ministers – sat down with T&T’s PM Kamala Bissessar to address concerns about there not being a more seamless cooperation between our two countries!! It was announced that a working group would be established – including the private sector of both countries – to “address the development challenges and opportunities between the two countries”. Now this does appear to a case of locking the stable door loooooong after the horse has bolted!!
Ever since Exxon struck oil off our Atlantic back in 2015, hasn’t T&T been right up there in the mix – grabbing opportunities left, right and center to make money off our belated strike. With their 100-year headstart in the oil industry, they had all the infrastructure, skills, and manpower etc to take advantage – since our business class was still stuck mostly at the importation of plastic buckets stage!! Initially Exxon staged all their drilling hardware etc from T&T wharves and used T&T labour!!
Our hastily arranged “local content” law didn’t do much to staunch their move into the “commanding heights” of our nascent oil industry!! Your Eyewitness remembers that Trini company which literally BOUGHT a Guyanese – who’d never ever set foot in Guyana being born furrin from Guyanese parents! – and made him an “owner” so they could “qualify”!! They had to be sued, if he remembers correctly!! So, if you scratch the registration filings of many so-called local companies in our oil industry, you’ll uncover the beneficial owners are Trinis!!
Be as it may, it cannot be gainsaid that we still gotta import workers and businesses with the requisite know-how to maintain our growth trajectory!! So, your Eyewitness thinks it’s a good thing to have some structure in sorting out the modalities of our cooperative development!! Take for instance, our need for a refinery. If T&T’s willing to make the appropriate adjustments to their refinery to deal with our sweet, light crude – theirs is the sour, heavy crude, like Venezuela’s – then maybe we can ship our 14.5% oil uptake for them to refine!! Let THEM deal with the pollution concerns, not to mention getting the oil to Crab Island, where there’s no clearance to accommodate the large tankers demanded!!
The other benefit is that in our present geopolitical configuration, Kamla’s doing most of the heavy lifting to cuss out recalcitrant Caricom leaders for not backing us!! Then additionally, she’s sharing the cheerleading on the US’ “Shield of the Americas” initiative headed by Kristi Noem!!
While tactically this takes much of the heat away from us vis a vis allies like Caricom and China, strategically, it keep our main option with the US alive!!
But watch them!!

…Hormuz blockade?
With the talks between the US and Iran – at the best reading – “on pause” and at the worse, “Kaput”, the announcement by the Yanks that THEY’re gonna blockade the Straits of Hormuz, took a lot of folks by surprise!! Weren’t the Iranians criticized – not to mention being bombed into the stone age – because they’d blockaded the same Strait and raised the world’s inflation?? Or more importantly, pushed up gas prices in the US and frayed tempers at their gas pumps?? Incidentally it may interest you, Dear Reader to learn that our gas prices are about DOUBLE those in America!!
The American Blockade’s gonna push those prices – along with other related goods like fertilizers – even higher!! Won’t this produce some more hostile blowback against the Trump administration?? But more worrying to your Eyewitness is what’s gonna happen if the Chinese attempt to send one of their tankers through the Strait??
Can you imagine what’s gonna happen if the Yanks try to stop them – and they refuse??

…desperation
The PNC held their “Street Parliament” in East Ruimveldt last Saturday evening. Unlike their ads announcements, all their big ones were there – unfortunately spouting the same, recycled, verbiage!!
How many more times Jah – we’ll hear about victimization??!!