Get real, activists tell Govt

Social activists told the Government to “keep it real” at a National Consultation on Social Development at Crowne Plaza on Friday. Some 150 participants from a broad cross-section of society related their concerns about the views of a Ministry of Social Development working paper covering social issues as diverse as health, HIV/AIDS, gender, ethnicity, crime, family life and poverty alleviation. Setting the tone for the event was dramatist Hal Greaves, portraying a miserable fellow afraid to seek social assistance. He warned participants: “Sometimes when people come to help, it is as if they are throwing it for fowl, as though we are less than human.

It’s not easy for people to come and ask for help; what words do we use? Sometimes they make it sound as if it is in a book...and I’m not in the book. It’s not ‘paper,’ it’s not ‘issues,’ it’s people.”   While participants generally appreciated the chance to share their concerns, they expressed a mixed attitude to the working paper distilled for them from several previous focus-groups and mini-consultations. From the floor Verna St Rose Greaves declared: “Our problem is in implementation. What else do we need to know about vagrancy and homelessness before we can do something about it? Let’s talk about who’s going to do it, how and when. The time is now!” An ex-patriate male, recently returned from the United States where he said he was daily tracked by someone wanting to throw him and his children in jail, said: “Trinidad and Tobago is not the worst place in the world. Just outside Yale University are all the problems we in TT have, in their boldest and brashest forms.”

Other speakers said the working paper was too idealistic and bureaucratic. One man said: “The language of the document is precise but unclear. It varies from being very loose to being ‘technocratese.’” Sharon Bradshaw of the Caribbean Conference of Churches observed: “If you ask the wrong questions at the beginning, you’ll get the wrong answers.” Former Minister of Health Dr Emanuel Hosein used sarcasm to call for  a more realistic paper to be presented. He derided: “Let’s build a road to Tobago.” A young woman recently returned from the United States echoed that call, saying: “I’m not here to deal with all these bells and whistles.” But one man concluded that while he had some misgivings about the document, he would prefer to have it than have no document at all. Making specific suggestions, mood consultant Dr Robert Moultrie wished the consultation would more emphasise the creating of peace and harmony in our society, saying we must stop denying that negative anger was holding all of us back. “There should be a Ministry to deal with negative anger. We should address the impaired parent-child relationships of which we have an epidemic in Trinidad and Tobago,” he said.”

Many speakers tried to put the consultation into context emphasising what they saw as the most important external factors. Gregory Sloane-Seale of the YMCA warned that worldwide, the privatisation of public services like health, water, and prisons, had destroyed the social fabric of many countries. Academic Dr Winston Suite echoed the earlier warning by Prime Minister Patrick Manning that 24-hour television rarely portrayed our culture. He said, “We want to be somebody else. We don’t know who we are.” Suite recounted that in the 1970s people had ignored a rise in school-dropouts, whom he described as mostly young African males, some of whom  were now criminals. He warned that our sociologists must avoid the errors of our teachers who had switched schooling from “education” to “training.” A Mr Regis noted the coming oil/gas boom but lamented: “Why in the face of such abundance can’t I dare to imagine this vision will be achievable?” Just before lunch a Maloney woman admonished participants. Relating her recent trauma when confronted by several young bandits who kept repeating to her “We not afraid to die, we not afraid to die!,” she quoted scripture to warn: “Without a vision a people perish.” Earlier at the seminar Minister of Social Development Mustapha Abdul-Hamid said all contributions would be taken into account, and that consultation would be ongoing.