The post-independence tragedy

By the early 1960s development thinking had become a major preoccupation.

The aim was not only to put in place arrangements for sustainable economic development but to establish a framework for civil and peaceful social evolution.

Per capita income has increased, thanks mainly to the energy sector.

There are more highways and more cars on the roads.

On the other hand agriculture as a share of GDP has declined from over ten percent in the early 1960s to less than one percent in recent years. The food import bill has skyrocketed, and the goal of self-sufficiency in food production remains a pipe dream as more and more agricultural land is diverted to other uses.

Unfortunately, while incomes have increased, prices seemed to have increased even faster. In the 1960s and 1970s, a teacher or public servant could easily have acquired a piece of land or a three-bedroom house with ease. Now for a modest three-bedroom house you need at least $1.3 million, and the average household would be hard-pressed to raise a corresponding mortgage on the basis of prevailing wage and salary levels. No wonder everybody now wants a government subsidised house. How much is development and how much is illusion? For various reasons, many of the post-independence institutions have collapsed or become dysfunctional.

Certainly the political arrangements, imperfect from inception, have become increasingly irrelevant with time, perpetuating dangerous constitutional anomalies.

We have created positions which deem that the holder is not accountable to anybody.

From my experience in the audit office I can safely say there are no angels among us .The person holding the President’s position is supposed to be non-political, but as soon as he or she is absent the position is taken over by a politician in a different guise with full regalia and all the powers of the substantive holder of the office.

Can people elected for five years make long-term decisions without a conversation with the people who elected them? We uprooted, without murmur, the colonial train system which moved both people and goods on acceptable economic and environmental terms, if a social cost/benefit analysis was applied.

This system could have been the basis of a mass transportation system. Despite all the wars the Europeans have fought among themselves they never destroyed their rail systems.

Caroni Ltd which was avowedly closed for financial reasons faced many challenges, some internal and some with roots in the global economy. An enterprise which offered the greatest possibilities for diversification along a broad front was callously destroyed to make way for Cepep and URP. We now import sugar and all its by-products, along with tons of citrus and dairy products.

We have also been extremely careless with the environment and have allowed national assets to decay.

Take the Orange Grove Savannah, for instance, which was once the pride of east Trinidad, hosting five cricket grounds for communities from San Juan to Arima. It is now a virtual cow park for fetes and political rallies. Not a single pitch in evidence.

On Independence Day I looked, as I have always done, at the parade of the troops in their clean, wellpressed uniforms and ostentatious display of transport and military equipment.

The speeches have varied little in content over time. I was still impressed at the display of paraphernalia.

But I had questions.

Why with all these assets haven’t we been able to catch the gun and drug runners? Why haven’t we been able to catch the thieves and murderers? Why is there no water in the hydrants? Where are the fire trucks and ambulances when we need them? Why can’t the police respond more urgently to a call? The country is flooded with guns and drugs. I understand the chances of a killer being caught is about ten percent. The possibility of getting a conviction is even more remote.

Security is perhaps the biggest industry in the country. For years the evidence has been pointing to serious problems in recruitment, in organisation, in the use of technology and in leadership.

Money is not the problem.

By ignoring indiscipline and promoting mediocrity we have created a savage society where the most heinous murders take place on a daily basis. You tell me that after 54 years a chief of police can’t emerge from the ranks? Who created the convoluted process of selection? Who signed all the international agreements that protect the lawless and create terror for the law-abiding? At the judicial level the various branches can’t get their act together.

On the one hand we have difficulty catching the perpetrators, and when we do cases take over ten years to process. People die and witnesses and evidence disappear.

There is a chronic loss of respect for the judicial system.

As a small country the pool of people from which to choose is by definition also small. Yet the political parties are so structured that no matter who is in power half the population is left out of the governing process. Ability and training can mean very little in appointments to key positions. We keep recycling the same bunch of failures and expect different results.

Bad habits in general governance have become worse.

Take the foreign service, for example. The practice is to fill the highest positions with political failures, hacks and friends. In many cases the appointee has never even done a one-day crash course in international relations. The foreign service is used as a vehicle to reward or exile people. Is it any wonder that the professionals have disappeared.

* Ramesh F Ramsaran is Professor Emeritus at UWI, St Augustine