Ungovernable

We have now reached a stage where Party has clearly trumped nationhood. And why not? The parties are there, in the consciousness of their members and supporters, to hand out bribes and favours for bribes and favours, but the nation has nothing to offer any more. Not even a vision or a hope for the future any more. All sense of destiny and legacy for our children has been swept away in two flash floods of oil and gas dollars which our leaders— business and political—spent on establishing secure bases overseas, in Miami, Toronto, Costa Rica and Panama. We have learned to destroy our hills and forests and poison our rivers, and toss our garbage everywhere but in the assigned dumps.

Yes, there are laws against littering and destruction. But we have laws against fraud, bribery, cheating, bad driving, noise, and of course banditry and rape and murder. But laws no longer matter in this land.

We are free, free to do what we like, regardless of the feelings of others or the written laws of the land. We live in a state of anarchy, doing what we want, and encouraging our children to exceed even our own state of abandonment of our cultures, rituals and decency.

So when, in the face of our ongoing failures and chronic ills, our Prime Minister announced that he would “Address the Nation” last Sunday night, all man began to worry.

Might the PM discover common sense and announce that he was going to live up to his election propaganda and bring us all to heel? Would we all soon have to actually obey the laws of the land? Would he call out the names of all those who hid vast wealth in Clico and whom the rest of us paid back when they crashed Clico? These were serious enough worries for his Minister in the Office of the PM to call upon the population to “remain calm”. All who had cocoa in the sun were running for tarpaulins.

But what a letdown it was! A relief to many of course, but a not unexpected disappointment to those who held some hope that enlightenment or inspiration might have prevailed.

Instead of speaking to us, and Dr Rowley is a good speaker, he adopted the traditional (since Queen Victoria) approach to stand woodenly in a badly produced movie and mouth bureaucratese nothings at us. Kamla and the UNC were blamed for all our current troubles, and corruption, incompetence and nepotism of some 40 years of PNM failures have nothing to do with our state of mind and treasury. He is going to spend another $120 million on “intelligence gathering”, which means our phones are going to be tapped again. What he should do is spend that money to purchase a real Commissioner of Police. But on that subject his stated position was “it is the intention of the government to initiate a process....” which will lead to what? Another five years of paying foreign consultants to draft terms and consider applications and then send us another two milquetoasts like we got from Midwestern Canada last time? What gang warfare or drug cartels and corrupt governments did they ever meet before they came here? Did any of you watch a few weeks back, the performance of Dallas Police Chief David Brown? When he was born in 1960, there was not a black police officer in Texas. But this man, strong, eloquent and articulate leads a mostly white police force. His kind of authority is what we need here. And please accept that there is no one here who can do the job.

The reason we want to have “a local” is to ensure that crime continues as it is, at all levels of society.

Then we have FACTA , a protocol we are supposed to adopt to be compliant with the current standards of international fraud. Apparently the UNC supported it at their turn at the trough, but the PNM did not.

Now the PNM says they support it, but the UNC will not! Is this a quiet agreement between them all to keep us free to be corrupt? This is part of the blanket of protection called Section 34 folks.

And of course no one is ever responsible for anything, anywhere in TT , so the governments can fail to lead while the people remain ungovernable.