Ital Revolution by Wayne Kublalsingh

Here's an excerpt from the book to whet your appetite!!

Preface

Part One of this manual is a series of twelve articles published in Sunday Newsday between July and October 2008. Part Two contains twelve letters published in Newsday and other media at various times between February and October 2008.

The articles make a simple argument: the heavy gas-based aluminium and steel agenda, embarked on by a few government executives in 2001, is uneconomic. The costs to the lands, peoples and communities of Trinidad and Tobago are more than the benefits. This agenda must be deconstructed.

The architects of this agenda are using a simple accounting trick. Immense financial, ecological, social and opportunity costs are disappeared; these are not entered in the cost accounting of these projects. In the long term, the bandits hope to make a marginal financial gain, which they will use to claim profitability.

This agenda is bent on converting productive economic and fragile ecological resources into paper returns, an asset, at best, at risk. Vast spending on unnecessary mega projects has become the norm.

Ital Development has become the exception. Key possibilities for health, education, security, agriculture,
sports, communications, industry and infrastructure remain dormant. This situation re-affirms a historical lesson: governments and elites cannot be left alone to conduct the economic affairs of the nation.

The people must become participants in the economic destiny of the nation. They must enter their economic history.

One hundred times have the people been denied over the last seven years: at the gates of Caroni 1975 Ltd, at the gates of the National Energy Corporation, the National Gas Corporation, the Environmental Management Authority, the Ministries of Finance and Energy; at the gates of the Prime Minister, the President, the Parliament.

The solution is simple. The people must storm the gates of their economic history. They must demand the right not just to see the accounts, but to red-ink and replace entire projects. They must overrun the accounting office and the estate for development.

Thank God for our people, our communities of Chatham, Claxton Bay, La Brea. For our legal teams, our media teams, our street fighters, our artistes, our writers. For our journalists and media houses. For our financial sponsors. For the gifts of ten thousand nameless and faceless persons. For our deconstructionists.

Wayne Kublalsingh
December 2008

ITAL DEVELOPMENT

Thank God for Rastafari.

Rastafari has given us this wonderful word: ITAL. This word means real, essential, authentic. It is an indigenous word, created by an indigenous community in the Caribbean, the Rastafari. Ital food, for example, means food which is natural, without salt, without chemicals, pure. Ital development is development which is real; it actually generates resources, land, food, health, energy rather than deplete them. It creates wealth rather than impoverishment. It is based on authentic development, not deals. It is essential; it is rooted in our local geography. It respects the intrinsic value of land, water, vegetation, air, social practices and people. These stocks of wealth, says ital development, constitute the vital resources of a nation and not, for example, paper, a paper economy, a declining US dollar.

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