Who Keeps the Rent?

THE COUNTRY MAY have spent the last week arguing the wrong question.

The Prime Minister signs a Memorandum of Understanding with Global Ports Holding. This newspaper asks whether it is investment or a disguised sale. The talk shows harden into their usual camps. But “sale or not a sale” is a question about a piece of paper. The question our history should have trained us to ask first is simpler, and harder, for the next thirty years, who keeps the rent?

Begin with what was actually signed, because the confidence on all sides this week has run well ahead of the facts. An MOU is not a concession. It is an agreement to negotiate, exclusively, in this case, toward a contract that does not yet exist. The terms that will decide whether this is a good arrangement or a bad one are not yet written, far less published. So the honest reply to every assured claim made this week, is the same, we are arguing about a contract none of us has read.

Now to the heart of it. Mr. Kutman told us, generously, that we are the landlord and he is merely the tenant. It was offered as reassurance but it should not be received as one. Ask any landlord whose tenant collects all the rent, sets the rules of the house, keeps the shop on the ground floor, and pays the owner a fixed sum to stay quiet for thirty years, ask him what his ownership is actually worth. Title is the consolation a plantation economy is forever offered while the surplus sails out of the harbour. We keep the deed, the value leaves on the tide. We have watched this film before, in cane and in bananas, and we know how it ends. Lloyd Best spent a career trying to teach us the difference between owning a thing and controlling what it earns. The cruise port is that lesson, arriving once more by sea.

Consider the economics plainly, because they are not complicated. The port lost money in four of the last five years. Its single profitable year, 2023, returned EC$266,000, against some EC$15 million spent operating it over the period. Against that record, GPH offers EC$225 to EC$250 million in phased investment, EC$75 million of it in the first phase and, the phrase that should make every borrower’s ears prick up, no new government debt. But capital is never free, and it is never charity. A quarter of a billion dollars put to work at even a modest return must throw off something on the order of EC$13 million a year to justify itself to the people who provide it. That money does not descend from the clouds.

It is drawn from passenger charges, from port dues, from the retail floor, maybe from the excursion that once belonged to a Vincentian taxi-man and tour guide. The question is not whether GPH will profit. It must, and it will, behaving exactly as capital is built to behave. The question is who stands on the other side of that EC$13 million, year after year, and whether the contract we sign leaves any meaningful share of it on this island.

Then there is the thirty percent, the stake to be offered to ordinary Vincentians through a special purpose vehicle, and held up this week as ownership for the common man.

Welcome it but read it cold. Thirty percent is a minority. It does not set the tariff, time the capital spending, or declare the dividend.

The holder of the other seventy does all three. The Bahamas is paraded as the proof, some 3,600 citizens, we are told, who recovered their money. Perhaps they did, but at what entry price, on what borrowing, and which Bahamians, the man at the bus stop, or the man already seated at the table?

We are entitled to those answers before we buy, not after.

Here is the deeper habit I want to name, because it is older than this deal and will outlast it. There is an instinct in these islands to treat the arrival of a large foreign cheque as itself the development. It is not, it is a financing decision, and financing decisions are won or lost entirely in the fine print, in who collects the dues, who caps the tariff, what is owed to us if the operator underdelivers, in which court a dispute is to be heard, and in what condition the port returns to our hands in 2056. None of that lives in an MOU.

All of it is negotiable now, while the ink is still wet on nothing. Which is precisely why the agreement, when it is drafted, must be laid before this nation rather than sprung upon it , as this understanding was, absent from any manifesto, announced first and explained afterward.

Let me be plain about where I stand, so I am not misheard. I do not write to oppose the modernization of the cruise port. It is overdue, and a specialist operator may well be the sensible route to it. I write because the lesson of our history is not that strangers are wicked, but that we are careless, that we sign away the rent and console ourselves with the deed. No one is coming to read this contract on our behalf. No one is coming to negotiate its terms in our interest. A landlord who will not read his own lease is a landlord in name only.

So publish the agreement. Let us see the revenue share, the tariff terms, the guarantees, the court, the day of reversion. Then, and only then, will we know what we have become owners of this port, or merely the address printed on someone else’s invoice.

_ Professor C. Justin Robinson is Pro Vice Chancellor and Campus Principal, UWI Five Islands Campus