Spend oil windfall this way

1) Remove the vagrants from the streets; they seem only to pick on children and women as well as scatter the garbage all over the streets, which is highly unsanitary as well as unsightly.

2) Upgrade the Immigration department, why do we have so many illegal immigrants? Monitor this situation.

3) Have social workers make house calls, to ensure our children are being looked after. Hire more social workers; there are too many children on the streets begging and subject to other elements of street life. They are our future.

I lived in another island where the social services together with the ministry of education monitored children who do not attend school without a doctor’s certificate and the parents are held liable and prosecuted if that child missed school. (I see children selling on the streets all during the year and wonder why they are not at school) what are we doing about them, are we creating more illiterate people?

4) Do something about the overcrowding in the jails and the increase in AIDS. Give hope to the inmates who may want to reform. Do not put the petty offenders and the hardened criminal, ie murderers, drug traffickers, child molesters and rapists, in the same cell as a person held for smoking a prohibited substance or shoplifting or fighting or cursing or even white collar crime. That is another way to create more hardened criminals.

5) How do we expect to reduce crime when we are making our own locally produced criminals? Have some reform programmes, counselling, etc for the offenders, particularly the first time offenders and also to keep them separate from murderers etc whilst incarcerated.

6) Carnival is our culture. Do not make masqueraders so frustrated that we have no bands to look at, also onlookers must be given consideration as well because we will have no one to look at ‘mas.’ Please, all relevant authorities clear the routes for all Carnival lovers, local, fresh-water and foreign.

7) There is no reason why everyone in this country cannot live in a properly constructed house, with indoor plumbing etc, the days for shacks should be over, especially with our oil dollars. Make hay while the sun shines. We are not guaranteed an oil boom every day.

We do not live in a perfect world but we can sure try to make a step towards it, and start with Trinidad and Tobago.