Reform — PNM political football

It has been decades of several tiers of deceit and procrastination geared to generate time-buying expectations

Khan promised that local government reform based on substantial devolution of authority to the regional corporations, using the failed and discredited Tobago House of Assembly model, would be achieved prior to the holding of the election on Monday

He even threatened to disband the Ministry of Local Government as redundant and render himself unemployed

Well that and God’s face we never did see, he now sitting comfortably in the energy tower

But the local government reform mantle is now passed to former San Fernando mayor Kazim Hosein who will now reinvent the reform wheel all over Trinidad again

Not to be outdone, Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley has made local government reform the cornerstone of the PNM’s current local government campaign. It is the magic bullet, the panacea to cure all the ills of the regional corporations even though we all know that many rural-based ones will be starved of the requisite funding in these guava season days and nothing will happen or change

I am also reminded of the mantra chanted by the late PM Patrick Manning to the effect: central government would determine policies and local government will implement those policies. But while doing so repeatedly, he was presiding over the building of the $7 billion Government Campus and the waterfront project at which all government offices were to be centrally located in Port-of-Spain, including the Ministries of Works and Education

Even after one year, agriculture cannot make the much touted move to a new building in Chaguanas

The proposals to give Tobago increasing and greater autonomy are also in cold storage awaiting resuscitation

The new Licensing Office in Caroni built with $250 million of our money is slowly but pathetically disintegrating

STEPHEN KANGAL Caron