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UWI political scientist Dr Bishnu Ragoonath says it is difficult to gauge the government’s performance during its first 100 days in office as it had never revealed what it hoped to accomplish during the period.
The Kamla Persad-Bissessar administration, which won 26 of the 41 seats in the April 28 general election, completed its first 100 days in office on August 9.
Ragoonath told Newsday, “The government never gave us a 100-day plan. So there is nothing to measure it by to say whether they accomplished what they set out to do in their first 100 days or not. There was no 100-day plan.
“In many instances, a party, when seeking election, will tell you this is what they will do in the first 100 days. They never told us that. So in a way you cannot measure what they never said they were going to do.”
He also believes that the government has not had time to make any significant impact by way of legislation since winning the election.
“Bearing in mind that the parliamentary term would have gone on recess as expected at the beginning of July, they only had a few sittings of Parliament just prior to the recess so that there was nothing much they could have done parliamentary-wise in terms of legislation.”
Ragoonath noted, though, the government did manage to pass the amendment to the Prime Minister’s Pension (Amendment) Bill 2025, which essentially prevented Stuart Young from qualifying for a pension after having served as prime minister for just 42 days after Dr Keith Rowley’s departure from office on March 16.
Ragoonath said, “But apart from that there was no real major legislative changes.”
The legislation, which required a special majority, was passed in the House of Representatives on June 27. It limits the award of a pension to a prime minister to those individuals to those who serve at least one year in the post.
Ragoonath said the government also sought to bring about change in several areas, “by adopting certain policy positions which could impact on various types of situations,” nationally.
For instance, he observed the government still seemed intent on scrapping the demerits points system for drivers.
At a post-cabinet press briefing on May 8, Persad-Bissessar expressed plans to scrap the demerit point system which came into effect in 2020.
On that occasion, she said the government had, up to that point, found “no evidence” that the demerit point system reduced road traffic accidents.
But at the American Chamber of Commerce annual general meeting on June 13, Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation Eli Zakour said the demerit point system continues to remain in effect as the policy will have to get a negative resolution in Parliament.
For a policy subject to a negative resolution to be passed or changed, Zakour had said, the government would have to publish it in the gazette. Should the opposition be in disagreement with the policy, they will have to put a motion in Parliament to have it reversed, he added.
Ragoonath said the decision to shut down the Community-Based Environmental Protection and Enhancement Programme (Cepep) was another example of a policy position the government took early in its tenure.
All contractors under the programme were handed termination letters on June 27 at the company's head office on Factory Road in Ste Madeleine.
The decision left approximately 360 contractors and more than 10,500 workers on the bread line.
“I don’t think that people expected that they would have just shut down the Cepep programme. When you looked at the whole Cepep programme, what we would have expected that the government would have done a lot of reviews of existing policies and programmes as well as to review issues such as Cepep and how they would have dealt with it. But the impact of those decisions we really did not expect.
“Nonetheless, the fact remains that the government is simply doing what was expected of them. And what was expected was for them to review existing policy positions so that they could set their own policy agenda.”
On August 7, Justice Margaret Mohammed raised grave concerns about the extension of over 300 contracts – allegedly approved without proper authority – for investigation by the Director of Public Prosecutions.
Ragoonath said the country will just have to wait and see what pieces of legislation the government is likely to bring and pass in the Parliament when sittings resume in September.
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