What north-east children need

Councillor Terry Rondon doesn’t know how to make these things happen so he’s on a mission of distraction and personal benevolence, networking to create a toy bank to appease the distressed children in that remote part of the country.

I say forget toys, gift the children with tools that will transform their lives and generations to come. Gift the children with durable roads, not the usual mediocre garbage roads that pride-deficit local contractors build as north-east access roads.

Gift the children with reliable electrical and fuel power. Gift them with reliable, clean, plentiful water. Gift them with reliable communication services. This will connect them to the rest of the country so they can then support themselves on their own feet with their own resources.

Don’t do north-east Trinidad the disservice of gifting them with more mediocre infrastructure and services. They’re fed up with State mediocrity.Anyone awaiting a socio- economic paradigm shift away from party financier development and prosperity to wide national development, focused on the whole nation, led by government, is living in a fantasy world.

Government’s (PNM, UNC) concern is not improving all parts of this country. Government’s concern is lording it over citizens. Political parties are concerned with which of them is landlord of TT to gather its wealth and store it in the bank accounts of the merchant class — the ownership class.

Government’s concern is serving party financiers.

If the country was pro-people, all parts of TT would steadily see improvement. The national motto would be “improve on perfection”.

For every effort, every expenditure would be strategic to get the greatest value and to spend on improving quality rather than patching up mediocrity or replacing mediocrity with more mediocrity.

Where there’s relative improvement, egocentric price-gouged improvement, in tall buildings in Portof- Spain, just next door are concentrations of over 1,000 people living in slums. The irony is it’s manual labour of the concentration of slum dwellers who yearly improve Port-of-Spain, while the wider nation is left behind, the further they are from urban “greedism”.

MIKE LESTER via email