Making life better by blocking off road?

There can be only one reason for government: to make life better for the people.

Full stop. There can be no other reason.

So it was with great annoyance that I suffered a huge traffic jam in Port-of-Spain on my way to work Tuesday morning because some “bright spark” had put police to cordon off lower Richmond Street at the height of rush hour because “the Prime Minister was coming (at 11.30 am) to open the new government offices there.” Now, tell me, how did blocking off lower Richmond Street from about 8 am until the ceremony finished at about 12.30 pm make my life better? How was the security for the Prime Minister improved by blocking off the street some three to four hours before he was due to arrive? As it was, an officer in a police car way behind mine decided to muscle his way through the traffic by turning on his siren after he had been stuck in the same jam as the rest of us and obviously decided he wasn’t going to wait.

Waiting, after all, is just for the peasants.

I am absolutely fed up. The politicians on both sides don’t seem to care one jot about the people. All they seem to care about is themselves. So long as they are all right why should they care about the ordinary citizen? We don’t have a functioning democracy. What we have are a bunch of neo-colonialists who have learned the language and mannerisms of our former colonial masters and who continue to impose colonial values and systems upon us, the ordinary citizens.

It was wrong yesterday and it remains wrong today.

ROBIN MONTANO via email