Above: The manifesto documents of the PNM and UNC.

BitDepth#1261 for August 06, 2020

Last week, the Prime Minister promised a new Ministry of Technologies and Digital Records if the polls grant him a second term in office.
This ministry will, the PM promised, bring about modernisation in governance.
Coming out of covid19, he said, “will come a modern TT.”

It’s just part of the peppering of the word technology to be found in the PNM’s recently released political manifesto.
Technology also makes a significant appearance in the UNC manifesto (with an almost obsessive focus on biotechnology), a surprising development given the difficulty that the country has had, at least in government, in moving tech from buzzword to everyday practice.

Alert readers might recall a recent column in this space which called for a Ministry of Tomorrow, which posited a more ambitious plan for governance level engagement with digital systems and forward looking planning for the country.

On its surface, there’s nothing wrong with a plan to digitalise the records and transactional information required for a smooth running government administrative process.

Except that making it a ministry needlessly politicises what should be a basic function of the public service sector, improvements to which have been halting and irregular for almost two decades.

The presentation of a manifesto has its place in a political campaign. It is a list of promises to the voting public that the next five years will be governed more effectively than the last five.

Promises of technology advances are hard to articulate persuasively. There are few ribbon cuttings available to announce the successful completion of projects that advance incrementally and largely invisibly, yet the sector has taken a much higher profile in both documents.

It’s quite likely that this new zeal to tout bits as a solution to the nation’s woes has been fuelled by the experiences of Trinidad and Tobago under Covid-19.

The PNM manifesto is clearer about its plans to offer incentives for technology development and calls out, in red, italic type, the statement; “We will remove all taxes on computers, mobile and digital equipment, cell phones, software, and accessories.

That’s taking it a step further than Basdeo Panday did in the first UNC administration (1995-2001) when he abolished the import tax on computers, though it might be argued that returning to that position with greater gusto 20 years later acknowledges just how many of our devices are computers today.

The distance between facilitating digital consumption and driving entrepreneurship is one that successive governments have proved unable to close.

Charges on computer imports were reinstated under the current PNM administration along with an additional import fee meant to tax the growth in online shopping.

But the distance between facilitating digital consumption and driving entrepreneurship is one that successive governments have proved unable to close.
It’s not as if all the initiatives listed in the two major party manifesto documents are startling news.

Elements of all the promises offered up for 2020 – except for biotechnology, that’s new – have been present in formal study documents and proposals dating back to the original Fast Forward project presented in 2003.

The prospectus for that project identified public sector reform as a critical driver for modernisation, noting that: “Introducing ICT in a pervasive way involves more than just technological change – it involves a rethinking of the processes and organisational structures used to deliver public services.”
Seventeen years ago, that thinking was heretical.

The prevailing governance style of Trinidad and Tobago tends to place private enterprise opportunities under state control, underwritten by petro-sector revenue.
After 1973, the country began acquiring businesses and turning them into state agencies, hitting a peak of 62 industries, including, according to a 2010 IADB report, “airlines, cement, telecommunications, hotels, food processing and, most importantly, energy.”

Spotty efforts at divestment during economic downturns have been matched by the appearance of a range of special purpose state agencies introduced to circumvent the perceived bureaucracy of the public sector.
Since the 1990’s, there has been a steady erosion of the role of the public service relative to the scope of government ministries.

The public service sector is supposed to be an engine of execution that’s removed from the political quirks of ministries, which are expected to set policy and direction.

If the system worked the way it’s supposed to, the public sector would be a model of efficiency, ready to execute political directives and policy initiatives decided on by an elected Cabinet.

There is no need for a ministry to handle digitalisation of records for the public sector. That should be function of a properly constituted public sector empowered by interlocking system that delivers services to citizens transparently and efficiently.

That doesn’t happen because politicians are terrified of a strong public sector capable of running the country accountably and with no reference to their ambitions to increase their constituencies.

In tandem with an empowered local government that operates with allocations based on community needs and guided by national planning, the responsibilities for governance change significantly. Local government is not a factor in either party’s manifesto.
The public service gets no love, haphazard training and inadequate resources.

Running a country is not the same as being elected to lead it and the deliberate blurring of those functions over the last three decades has been to the nation’s detriment.

What’s needed is an overdue harmonisation of common infrastructure in the public service and seamless information sharing within the sector.
Boasting that ministers take their paper work around on a tablet seems a retrograde assessment of success. Keeping digital files in digital form isn’t a move forward. At best, it’s treading water or more accurately, spinning top in mud.

In eliminating the bureaucracy, checks and balances have also been sidelined, resulting an a disturbing abundance of corruption in these special purpose agencies.

That public sector, for instance, would have a published strategy for, say, road development and maintenance, internal reporting functions capable of responding to fast developing issues and clear processes for procuring suppliers.

A political party hoping to do road works on the eve of an election would be politely directed to review the road development plan.

Running a country is not the same as being elected to lead it and the deliberate blurring of those functions over the last three decades has been to the nation’s detriment.

The development of modern governance infrastructure demands continuity that rises above party imperatives and electoral ambitions. Technology is only one of many necessary development initiatives that have crashed and burned in the face of increasingly ruthless and personal politics.

In denaturing public sector bureaucracy, checks and balances have also been lost, resulting an a disturbing abundance of corruption in these special-purpose agencies.

But these are not topics that encourage cheering in socially distanced crowds wearing their party livery.

The necessary backroom work of governance is mind-numbingly dull if you aren’t a policy wonk, but if we don’t get those systems right, we get what we have today, vividly articulated promises followed by practical vapour.

An effort to rethink and reengineer the public service that began almost fifteen years ago died on the vine with a change of administrations and there has been no appetite to revisit that effort.
Stalled ambitions to implement technology projects are only a part of our outdated, top-down governance model.

The why of modern manifesto promises is evident, but nowhere in these documents is an explanation or realistic strategy to achieve these halcyon and often resurfaced notions.