Too much reliance on PNM’s ‘dependency syndrome’

THE EDITOR: After the fire in downtown Port-of- Spain, and what I am hearing is coming out of the incident, all I can say is that it is evident to me that in Trinidad we black people are destined to catch our tails. I am the owner of a small business in Port-of-Spain, and while I am not by any means what one would consider wealthy, I do get by and provide the necessities for my family. I also employ about half a dozen workers, some who are the sole breadwinners of their family. I do this in addition to paying a mortgage on the property in which my business is run from, also paying the appropriate government taxes, electricity, telephone and water rates, and NIB insurance for my employees. I began as a small one man operation in a space which I rented.

After several years, knowing what my long-term goals were, I prepared myself financially to purchase my own property and become better established. When I read about the so-called “business people,” firstly from the Breakfast Shed, and now from the Drag Mall, who for different reasons have both found themselves faced with losing, or have lost the locations in which they operated their businesses for all these many years, I wonder incredulously, during all those years of business did they never think about planning for the future? They have been fortunate enough to be allowed to run their business without facing the costs that normal businesses face each day, week, month and year.

Yet after all these years they have nothing to show for it? It seems that all they are prepared to do is take, take, take. Then should anything happen to do them, they can use the race card and claim that they are poor black people who now need the Government to assist them, though they have been fortunate recipients of freeness all for the last two or more decades. It seems that they know that the PNM philosophy of keeping citizens in the “dependency syndrome” will run to their rescue. All you need to do is scream “poor and black” and the PNM will bend over backwards.

Ironically I wonder how they can claim the “poor” part when I have read that in one instance one of the Drag Mall operators (selling watches and jewelry) claims to have lost between $300,000 to $400,000 in inventory, while another claimed on radio that he had lost over $500,000 in inventory in one of his businesses, as well as a second business he owned which was a restaurant and bar — and this is poor? I for one am getting fed up with the struggle I go through every day as a law-abiding citizen working hard and paying my way, while this government does nothing. Nothing for our health, education, security, or the basic infrastructure the country requires to move into the 21st Century. After all, why legitimately pay our way when we can sit back, pocket all the freeness being handed out whenever we shout “poor and black.” What is happening to do our individual or national progress?

JEREMY BELDEN
St James