Collapsing from the top down

At every turn, on every corner, and in all of our institutions, there is a palpable sense of failure .

And the real tragedy about this is that our foundations still surprisingly remain secure .

But as the top teeters into collapse, eventually our foundations will begin to fail too, as they become exposed to the ongoing rot and decay of neglect, mismanagement, corruption and the allencompassing lack of any sense of national responsibility in any area of governance or management .

What can be wrong with us? So blessed by location and a range of natural and human resources, most of which we have squandered more than once, we seem blissfully unaware of the current true state of our plight .

Somehow, twice in the past, the mechanisms of world oil prices have intervened to snatch us from bankruptcy and revolution, after we had wasted a heritage we were just lucky to have accessed. And we do not engage in this ongoing neglect just from indifference and laziness—although these two qualities are ever present in all of our pathetic endeavours—, we do it to facilitate a chronic flow of corruption. From petty corruption in face-to-face encounters with supposedly “free” government services, all the way up to multi-million dollar schemes of failed insurance companies where the principals enjoy poor peoples’ money to continue astonishing life styles. And all the way in between these are the massive, never- to-be-completed construction contracts within our petroleum sector, for our infrastructure development, and like icing on the side, the multi-million dollar attorneys’ fees as the two sides sue and counter sue each other as they circle in and out of government .

The ongoing physical deterioration of the whole of the refinery at Pointe-a-Pierre is an ongoing feature of our ownership and care of this “flagship” asset we took over .

Ruptured oil lines on the shipping pier caused an environmental disaster a couple of years ago, and while we tried to forget or dismiss that, a large tank at the refinery compound was leaking at its base for years, noted but ignored by highly paid operatives .

The “just a few barrels” from that tank, which conveniently had also lost its required earthen “bund wall”, has drifted on to beaches in Venezuela and to Venezuela’s offshore Caribbean islands, and now to Aruba. Do you really think it is only one tank in the refinery that is in a state of imminent failure? Or just the one pipeline which is at failure point? The total and apparently deliberately contrived failure of our shipping service to Tobago is no surprise to anyone. All efforts are being made to hide the facts from the public as to who and when and why decisions were taken not to ensure that a suitable cargo vessel was retained until replacements were in place. Or that the fast ferries did not undergo scheduled maintenance when required, by experienced and competent service providers .

But that could never happen, not in a land where “maintenance” means paying money to the courts for where you left your sperm .

The utter fiasco of the Tobago ferry service could not have been planned to be more unbelievable if we tried. But of course, just as at Petrotrin, nobody is at fault about any of this, these things, as we now know “just happen” .

And please do not think that it is just our physical assets that we destroy through neglect and rapacious mismanagement .

Our Judiciary and our lawyers are working feverishly and acrimoniously to tear down this pillar of our Constitution. You mean that none of these “learned” people could even seek to establish some dialogue within their profession to resolve the dispute surrounding the appointment of an apparently overworked magistrate to the High Court? What egos are driving these people? And from where do we now seek reason and justice when we have disputes? Them? And wondering if things could get worse, we have the apparent dispute between two very senior army officers (one now retired) as to how the children of the Attorney General (whom the AG has apparently not acknowledged as his children?) were allowed into a secure military base and given high-powered guns to play with. What is the “real truth” with this situation? And finally for this week, we had the sordid and shameful episode of an elderly man dying on the lawn of the Port of Spain General Hospital, where he was literally dumped by hospital security .

According to “the rules” only an ambulance could pick him up and bring him back inside? The foundations of our independence are being sorely tested by our criminal neglect of all of our infrastruct u r e and our institut i o n s .

But no one is responsible!