Above: St Clair Avenue, freshly paved a fortnight ago. Photo by Mark Lyndersay.

BitDepth#1480 for October 14, 2024

The 2025 budget was announced on September 30 under the theme, “Steadfast and Resolute: Forging Pathways to Prosperity,” though it seems that the pathways that are going to be forged over the coming election year, will be finished in asphalt, fringed with concrete box drains where appropriate.

And that paving is quite literal, since $200 million has been allocated to the Ministry of Works and Transport to spend on 100 road projects over the coming year. That’s going to get used.

It is also a budget of chaff, at least in the military meaning which describes countermeasures designed for distraction.

Several announcements and plans in the budget, detailed more usefully in the extensive supporting documents, simply will not happen before the next election and are likely to be carried forward again to the 2026 budget, drawing no comment, offering no explanation and padding these documents with the appearance of activity.

If, as a concerned taxpayer you were daunted by the Finance Minister’s novel-length budget address at just 178 pages, the daunting Public Sector Investment Programme (PSIP) is the War and Peace of creative obfuscation at 355 pages, followed by a competitively verbose Social Sector Investment Programme (SSIP), which justifies its 38 per cent slice of the budget across 221 repetitive pages.

The SSIP, for instance, breaks out more than nine billion dollars in spending according to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, skipping over many of them.

It’s here that you will find the full extent of the government’s commitment to the concrete and asphalt projects it can open with ribbon cuttings.

Grants to creatives and cultural organisations, however, dropped by more than half, from $42 to $22 million.

Allocated spending on cultural facilities is $21 million in Trinidad out of an estimated project cost of $588 million and $1.3 million in Tobago, one tenth of Tobago’s estimated project cost.

But we aren’t here to fret about all the failings of the 2024-2025 budget, just those relevant to technology.

The Digital Government Programme will spend $278 million in 2025 out of an expected overall cost of $630 million.

The ICT Technology Support programme in Trinidad is expected to cost $492 million, but will begin with just $6.5 million in 2025.

The Ministry of Digital Transformation (MDT) is expected to begin its Implementation of the National Digital Agenda with an allocation of $10 million. That’s to begin an implementation.

This project has three components, the digital transformation of government, accelerating the growth of the digital economy and strengthening cybersecurity incident response capabilities.

Four years after Hassel Bacchus took up the pioneering role of Digital Transformation Minister, the 2025 budget could not identify any completed transformation project that’s positively affected citizens.

Every major digital project in the PSIP is listed as either pending or described as being underway.

Digital projects are a hard political selling point, atoms being more visible than bits, but the transitional state of the government’s much trumpeted transformation has proven more notable by its oversights and hiccups than by any clear and unequivocal successes.

It isn’t helped by the shifting role of state agencies. eTeck was initially created to establish and manage a pioneering digital estate at Wallerfield to match the petrosector investment at Point Lisas.

That didn’t happen and now eTeck has metamorphosed or been repurposed as an estate manager with no particular commitment to technology advancement.

The TTIFC was founded to anchor Trinidad and Tobago as the financial capital of the Caribbean. Now it appears to be a software competitor to iGovTT, defining itself as a creator of digital transaction systems throughout the budget documents and not as the agent of a more enlightened financial regime.

The TTIFC now boasts of software development projects for the National Security Ministry, the Licensing Division, the Ministry of Agriculture, Lands and Fisheries, the HDC, Judiciary and Ministry of Trade and Industry.

Words are tossed around in these documents carelessly. A smart agriculture programme has nothing to do with IoT systems and data analysis. The big advance in agriculture? Replacing analog management procedures with digital alternatives.

The Finance Minister continues to confidently talk about e-books as an upcoming component of the education system, but hasn’t addressed the key sticking point with such a change, the licensing terms that publishers will demand for translating their paper documents to more easily copied digital files.

It’s notable in the US that in the higher education system, e-books are often more expensive than paper copies, unavailable second hand and are usually licensed with heavy digital rights management for a specific duration, after which they become inaccessible.

In May, a contract was signed between iGovTT, MDT and the UNDP to develop an e-ID software implementation. The process is expected to take three years, according to budget documents. That’s not going to happen before the next election.

Until things move forward with e-ID, it’s useless to talk about e-Health systems or e-Passports, unless there’s some ill-advised plan to do these projects in silos.The e-ID project, along with work to be done on the planned Tier 4 data centre (evidently being done in collaboration with TSTT) and the “modernisation and implementation of a National Cybersecurity strategy” will draw on an allocation of $50 million.

In its 2021 banker’s assessment of TT’s public sector, the IDB noted, “Underlying these challenges are important institutional weaknesses in the public sector such as low levels of digitalisation in government, archaic systems, undeveloped human capital, opaque policy-making and a lack of data that undermines the equitable and timely delivery of public and social services and evidence based policies.”

“Accelerating economic transformation by leveraging digitalisation and new technologies could help the country address the main development challenges particularly in the context of the pandemic and the need to develop economic resilience to unexpected shocks.”

The 2025 budget pays lip service to what needs to be done, but the emphasis is on keeping the electorate pacified by building out more politically palatable atoms, not the necessary foundational bits.