When Truth bites the dust

Oh no! My vision was blurred, my hearing dulled, my brain in a semi-coma. The persistent bedtime visitor, Mr Sandman, had been showering my room with his soporific golden brown dust all evening. It appeared that his sleep-inducing sediment was finally having its intended effect. The night-time phantasm’s sand was anaesthetising my sensory organs and nervous system and I was hypnotised, drifting into an otherworld of nightmares. I had to rid my eyes, ears and brain of the bedtime phantom’s blinding, deafening and stupefying grains. I wanted to return to the real world, to the actual debate on the police bills, out of this Sandman’s surreal TV scene in which the nocturnal fiend had Prime Minister Patrick Manning loudly declaring his Government’s intention to water-down the Integrity in Public Life Act 2000 and warning the Opposition that if it didn’t use its votes to help the PNM enfeeble the constitutionally entrenched legislation, the UNC would be considered “irresponsible.”

I dragged my hypnotised body from the bed to the bathroom where I washed the “sand” out of my eyes and ears by spraying these with cleansing solutions.  Cold water on my face kick-started my brain. I returned to the television set. Oh dear, the image and sound were the same as a minute ago. I hadn’t been falling asleep. The Prime Minister was indeed brazenly announcing that a bill would be brought to the House to amend the Integrity in Public Life Act, so members of State boards would not have to declare their assets or liabilities. If the UNC voted against the bill, he was cautioning, several of these board members would resign. The country, was his sober warning, would lose the service of many talented people and the loss would be the UNC’s fault. I knew I was wide awake, but I still could not believe I was hearing right. Instead of firing board members who didn’t want to make their requisite declarations, the PM was going to try to weaken the Act for them! Nah Manning.

The PM’s announcement was not merely scandalous, it was ironic. He and his MPs, during the three-day police legislation debate, had been demanding more accountability from even the most junior constable, yet Manning was now saying that the PNM would not be subjecting its people to the same scrutiny. It was incongruous also because the Government had not forgotten to lambaste the UNC for its volte-face on the police bills. Now, at the end of the legislative contest, the PM was announcing the PNM’s intention to do its own about face on the Integrity Act. It was a case of do as I say, not as I do and yet another display of our politicians’ ignorance of the meaning of “principled leadership.” The memory of TT’s representatives was as embarrassingly short-term as their economic, crime and education policies. In this particular case, the Prime Minister could not remember what he and his party had said or done in Parliament four years ago. He did not recall that the PNM, through its MP Colm Imbert had passionately expressed its support for the integrity legislation and asked for it to cover as many public officials as constitutionally possible.

“We (the PNM),” Imbert had told the House in October 2000, “ask that the chairman, the board members and the chief executive officers of every State enterprise be required to declare their assets with the Integrity Commission. We ask for that. There should be no discretion in this matter. Once you are willing to take the chairmanship of a state enterprise, why would you be afraid to declare your assets?” Imbert’s explanation for the PNM’s demands:  State enterprises such as Petrotrin had huge revenues and others such as NIPDEC were “in charge of the billion-dollar airport project.” If many State companies had budgets larger than those of most ministries, he contended, and ministers were expected to declare their assets and liabilities, so should board members of these mega enterprises. So what has changed since October 2000? Not a thing, except that the PNM is now in power. To borrow the words used by former president, Sir Ellis Clarke in another context, no one had the “foresight to see that political situations might alter cases,” when the Integrity Act 2000 was drafted.

At that time the PNM was sitting on the Opposition benches and the 2000 election was not going to alter its congressional position. Nevertheless, in its effort to persuade electors to vote for the Balisier in that year’s poll, the PNM acted as if it had invented the governmental buzz-words “transparency and accountability.” It got up on its soapbox at every parliamentary sitting and preached against alleged UNC corruption. The PNM is still pointing fingers at UNC MPs in Parliament and talking about how each Monday one of them is charged. The Government can safely fire these salvos because none of the Balisier boys and girls can be prosecuted for violating the Integrity Act since none has made a declaration. And not one of them ever might since the PNM appears to currently view the Integrity Act as a pain in its administrative neck. The Government’s strategy thus, is to avoid the legislation’s full enactment by any means necessary.

How many excuses have we been given by the PNM for its not giving effect to this law? I’ll tell you how many. Too many. And we’re about to be handed another. Instead of occupying itself with bringing the Integrity Act’s declaration forms to the legislature, the administration will waste more parliamentary time by laying another bill it hasn’t a chance of passing. The Joint Select Committee established to review the integrity forms laid its report last November in both Houses. In its statement, the Committee stressed that it considered “the approval by Parliament of the Prescribed Forms vital in order to give effect to the Integrity in Public Life Act of 2000.” Instead of ensuring the forms got the attention they deserved, the PNM has spent its time drafting a bill to exclude State board officials from the 2000 legislation. I bet you that when the citizens of TT are singing Auld Lang Syne this December 31, not a man or woman in public life will have made a declaration. The PNM, though, will claim it did its best to enforce the Act and it will chastise the UNC for not being serious about integrity. It will then announce as usual, its New Year’s “commitment” to honest, transparent, and accountable government.

There is something desperately wrong with our political leaders. They talk about development, progress by 2020, but each baby step forward is followed by a giant leap backward in time. They don’t even seem to care or realise that the public sees both the UNC and the PNM as occupied solely with retaining power and not at all interested in the pursuit and/or display of ideals or truth. While the undeniable objective of any political party is to govern, neither the UNC nor the PNM understands that there are certain levels of dishonesty to which they must not plunge. Black cannot be black today and white tomorrow because the two parties are adept at using political balderdash to bleach it. The sole thing keeping most of these phantom politicians where they are is the ethnic sand they throw in the electors’ eyes to blind and baffle them. The day the body politic decides to wash away the coma inducing grains, few of these political men and women of straw may receive a single vote. That’s when TT will truly rise and shine.