POOR EXCUSES FROM HOUSING MINISTRY

Mr Sharma, who has been appointed as the United National Congress’s front man for this sort of tactic, made his request in May. The Ministry apparently stonewalled him for nearly six months, and on Monday this week Madam Justice Judith Jones granted a declaration that Housing Minister Dr Keith Rowley was guilty of unreasonable delay in failing to provide Mr Sharma with the requested information.

In response, the Ministry has invoked Section 23 of the Information Act, which states that if no document of the type requested by the applicant exists, the public authority shall notify the applicant. The Ministry claims to have informed Mr Sharma of this, and says that "The approved housing application form of the Housing Development Corporation (formerly NHA) which must be filled out by prospective homeowners, does not solicit information on the racial, ethnic, or political background of any applicant."

This response is interesting in two ways. First of all, Mr Sharma’s application was a direct consequence of a statement made by Dr Rowley to the effect that the UNC deliberately discouraged Indo-Trinidadians from applying for NHA houses and that 60 percent of the applicants were Afro-Trinidadian. But, if the Housing Ministry has no data on race, where did Dr Rowley get these statistics from? Is the Ministry implying that its own Minister was talking without any basis in fact? And, if so, was Dr Rowley deliberately putting a racial slant on a political matter?

The second interesting aspect of the Ministry’s response is its disingenuousness. Even if data on race and ethnicity are not requested on application forms, people’s names certainly are. And it still remains the case that most people with Indian surnames in Trinidad and Tobago are Indo-Trinidadian. So it is no great task to take a sample of such forms and make a reasonable statistical analysis of how many applicants are Indo and how many Indos now occupy State-built houses. Indeed, if Dr Rowley was not speaking through his PNM hat, he may have had just such an exercise done in order to come up with his 60 percent figure. But, if he did have a Ministry technocrat cull such data, then it means that there is in fact a document in the Housing Ministry which has information on race.

So the ball is now in Dr Rowley’s court. He must make it clear whether his statistics were based on data or whether he was just quoting figures made up out of whole cloth. And he should clarify this issue before the court forces him to do so. If he remains silent, the public will draw its own conclusions.

The larger issue here, however, is why the Housing Ministry does not have such data readily available. If it is not hiding something, then it is clear incompetence for such a key Ministry not to have gathered information about applicants over the years. Apart from such data being necessary for effective public policy, the continual accusations of racial and political favouritism alone should have long spurred any responsible bureaucracy to carry out such an exercise to either refute such allegations or, if they were found to be true, take action to fix the problem. That the Ministry has never done so, or claims to have no such data, reflects poorly on its standard of performance.