PNM still refusing to account for actions

This acute demand exists along the east-west corridor, on the western coast, and within urban and suburban areas. The demand is highest precisely in areas where land for housing is least available.

Although Trinidad is a small country, the PNM has adamantly refused to decentralise government services. Its efforts at organising affordable housing have been worse than its bungling attempts at inter-island connectivity.

Under the Manning administration in 1992, the PNM produced a land-use document, the fate of which was to collect dust on a shelf somewhere. In 2002, with its usual incompetence, it produced another document — “Showing Trinidad and Tobago a new way home.” The PNM promised the nation 100,000 homes in 10 years. What a promise.

It wasted millions of taxpayers’ dollars by building high-rise towers on shifting lands — Las Alturas. Although Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley and, subsequently, Dick-Ford were reportedly ministers in the Ministry of Planning, Housing and the Environment during the planning and construction of that money tree, neither accepts responsibility — either for constructing or for demolishing.

Today, those whose duty it is to create a policy to facilitate the housing of the nation’s families and to protect the nation’s children — the heart and soul of tomorrow — have failed miserably in their duty to do so. The economic environment the PNM has created prevents ordinary people from acquiring homes.

You dare not assault their dignity by demolishing the meagre shelters they have constructed.

Where are the PNM’s heart and soul? What is most infuriating is that just as there is no accountability from the PNM when it builds irresponsibly and shabbily, in the same way it refuses to account to the nation and the victims of its wickedness when it demolishes.

Can you imagine in the 21st century and no government agency has accepted responsibility for this most recent callous demolition in Valencia? So which State institution ordered the destruction of the homes at Pine Gardens, in an exercise conducted by the Commissioner of State Lands? Attorney General Faris Al-Rawi told the media that “his office was not informed and neither was the Agriculture Ministry, the Housing Ministry or the Chief State Solicitor.” He asserted that he has “been calling for the Commissioner of State Lands to meet with me every single day since the 15th.” He said he has even written to her every day.

His office is just about two blocks away but after “written requests and umpteen phone calls” he could not discuss this with her.

Why did he not take a walk? Poor Al-Rawi. Like us, he too finds “it rather unusual that the Commissioner of State Lands will be acting entirely by herself (if sued), and (he is) concerned as to where the advice” originated.

STEVE SMITH via email