Click to view full size

Last Mon­day, one of the guests on Guardian Me­dia’s gen­er­al elec­tion night broad­cast, made a pre­dictable but nonethe­less sur­pris­ing at­tempt to fore­shad­ow the cur­rent ad­min­is­tra­tion’s in­abil­i­ty to de­liv­er on the many promis­es it made dur­ing the cam­paign.

Speak­ing gen­er­al­ly about the econ­o­my over the next five years, econ­o­mist Dr In­dera Sage­wan, made the fol­low­ing point:

“I want to say there is the pol­i­tics and the elec­tion and then there is gov­er­nance. And I would say that what the UNC (Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress) has that the PNM (Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment) does not have, is that when they get in­to of­fice and they are con­front­ed with the re­al­i­ty—be­cause they don’t know the re­al­i­ty, they would on­ly be spec­u­lat­ing—so when they get in there and they see the re­al­i­ty, they can now hon­est­ly speak to the pop­u­la­tion. But more im­por­tant­ly, I think, there needs to be a very clear path­way to hope. And I be­lieve peo­ple need to un­der­stand the chal­lenges—be­cause there is no quick fix, there is no mag­ic bul­let—to have di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion hap­pen to­mor­row.”