The URP problem

THE EDITOR: First, some anecdotes: When I was in my early teens, shortly after PNM came to power, the Crash Programme now URP, first came to Belmont Valley Road. The young men who were brought from Laventille to do construction work on the river which runs alongside the road spent much of their time harassing the residents on their way to school and work. The school girls were paid particular attention. I remember my brother who is a year older complaining to my father about some things that had been said to him. About twenty years later I was running a marketing research firm and was interviewing a young woman for selection on our field work team.

When I informed her that the pay was $50.00 for the day’s work, she let me know that she could get that kind of money doing nothing on the Projects — the Crash Programmes by another name. On another occasion there was a problem with my car and our secretary who was from Laventille, and a superb young woman, suggested that I take it to her brother’s place up the Hill. While he was working on it, one of his friends who was there liming, started a conversation with me. During the course of the conversation he informed me that he used to be a good mason and could hold his own in carpentry, but since he had become involved in the Projects a few years earlier, it seemed that he had lost a lot of his skills.

(Compare this with Mr Rupert of the prior generation who had helped to build my father’s house; and who was constantly in demand, working into his sixties.) Living in Petit Valley at the time, I would often take the Maraval Road when travelling to Santa Cruz, Maracas or Las Cuevas with my family. I noticed that it took the Projects workers about 2-3 years to rebuild a 40 ft bridge. This was in the late 1970’s, twenty-plus years after my brother’s complaint. Another twenty-five years have gone by. For the greater part of fifty years, instead of giving priority to developing our people’s sense of entrepreneurship, the PNM has mired a large section of the Afro populace in the Crash Projects, Special Works, DWED, URP programme.

When, by now, the oil money should have been used to transform Trinidad and Tobago into a dynamic, prosperous country through the innovativeness, creativity and hard work of all its people; instead a large section of the population have been turned into third and fourth generation welfare recipients. The diabolical aspect of this situation in Trinidad is that the recipients have accepted the politicians propaganda that they are involved in a work programme, because they show up somewhere each day and hang around for a while. Therefore, they have come to see this handout as a right. And if they can get easy money, why bother to work hard as the young interviewee had figured out twenty years earlier.

So now it has come to the point where desperate politicians of both the PNM and the UNC who know that power is not everlastingly theirs for living the bribed life, have elevated the criminal minority who have always been involved in these handouts from the beginning to a position of equal standing. Previously they used them only for their muscle. Now they are embraced as community leaders who can bring votes to the political machine.

As the politicians neediness has increased, their street-smart associates have raised the stakes. We put you in power, therefore we must have total control of the URP money in our fiefdom. The greed and jealousy that this new situation has encouraged in these deprived communities have made people turn to the gun to get their share of the spoils. Next time: some solutions that are fifty years in waiting. Progressive countries plan fifty to one hundred years ahead — Future 2050

ARTHUR NURSE AJALA
Port-of-Spain