When is help not really helping?

I presume that the statement about our own nationals profiting must mean that certain selected business persons of Peoples Partnership choosing will be paid to supply goods and services to these ravaged islands. It makes her offer of assistance sound as if the ‘recipients will be fed from a bowl, one by one, and then the bowl removed from their reach.

This translates into left over bricks, sand, nails, gravel, wood and galvanise, must be returned to Trinbago.

A bit like being given food cards but no cash. When this sort of offer is entered in print it looks bad. It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.

Everything said by members of both the Government and the Opposition remain exercises in semantics that have to be played out in the collective media for extended periods of time.

We have now become like a vision challenged person examining his ten dollar bills in case he mistakenly gives the beggar a $100, blue note.

We need to strike a happy financial balance between a burst main pipe and a trickle of moisture from the water hose.

The whole idea of Caricom is being unintentionally diminished. I believe that in the spirit of Divali we should be less stringent with our Caricom brothers and sisters.

In an attempt to appear more prudent than the PNM, the PP have set themselves out to look stingy and not accustomed to spending big money. Like in ‘never see come see.’

Lynette Joseph

via e-mail

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Prime Minister was making a case for the many unemployed masons, builders, carpenters in this country who could be sent to the islands to work in the rebuilding of the damage caused by Hurricane Tomas. We have to recognise that the days of just handing over millions to our Caribbean neighbours might be over. We can’t even pay public servants because we are already in deficit. We are not being miserly. We simply don’t have the money.