Dividing Force called Bad Governance

20, Sep 1999
It takes great patience to continue to live here. Almost every day one is forced to calm oneself to prevent the kinds of explosions that can be both self-destructive and harmful to the general welfare of the contractual arrangement which we call "society".

We expect the leading performers within the said arrangement to perform with a certain bigness of spirit and bigness of heart, with a certain respect for the people as a whole and a respect for what is constituted as the legal processes established through trial and error over many years and many epochs.

The failure to pay respect at all times to our constituted processes leads to higher and higher levels of immorality and corruption and to a blatant disregard for the core essentials of issues. We never seem to deal with the real issue, we always seem to fight up with all the non-essentials and with the masquerading of the realities.

No wonder Carnival is so great a part of our national psyche. What is he/she playing? And then every act, no matter how disrespectful of our body politic, is reduced to a kind of generalised "joke", like "Dhanraj wine", and is quickly forgotten and forgiven. In any other society much blood would flow for much less.

We never deal seriously with anything. Carlos John paves a huge chunk of the Savannah like a thief in the night without due process and without any authority. The big boys in Tidco and EDC, who possess great sway with the key members of the Cabinet, ordered that portion of the Savannah to be paved. Their only understanding of the promotion and marketing of this country's exports is limited to yearly "expositions", nothing more.

They prepared grounds off the highway in Trincity and held their last exposition there. It proved to be a massive, expensive flop.

We recall Caribbean manufacturers, in particular the Jamaicans, referring to it as a "grandiose flea-market" that did not attract any buyers, and the major criticism was that the location was too much away from the city and the key areas of commercial activity.

Tidco and EDC had to go back in PoS, but where? They could not muster the moral authority to pave part of the Savannah. They had to rope in the culture people, the mas men and the panmen, to give that act some semblance of legitimacy, especially after the argument of the need for the Independence military parade to be located there, without mud and slush, fell flat.

The end result is that the community of culture exponents is now split apart over the non-issue of whether parts of the Savannah should be paved or not, with the hills of Laventille threatening to come down against all those, like Peter Minshall, who stand against the paving.

Is the paving what is required to suffice our performing arts of mas and pan? Have we ever seen what Brazil has done for its carnival in terms of the structure called the "Sambadrome"?

Is the paving of bits of grass to be the "be-all and end-all" of our Carnival that brings yearly income to this country of over $253 million? Have we ever seen the fantastic, amazing drawings for a home for our pan and mas with which Terry Evelyn has been walking around for the past decades? How dare we threaten Peter Minshall for saying that he feels "raped" and "pillaged" by the paving?

In the final analysis, once again bad governance has only served to further divide the community. And the paving is not the issue, the issue is the question of legal authority and process.

Similarly, the issue of Colonel Brown's tapes and their relevance to Sankeralli's trial had nothing to do with whether the contents of the tapes could have freed him or not, but had to do with who held legal authority to decide whether the tapes had any bearing in the first place. And certainly the Prime Minister, the Attorney General and the Minister of National Security, meeting that fateful day in the Red House, had no such legal authority.

Are we surprise then to hear the Chief Justice lament about the attack on the independence of the judiciary? Imagine the CJ having to descend himself into the arena to do common battle? Once again bad governance is forcing deep divisions! But it is all typical of what obtains today. Look around, need we say more.

brenco@tstt.net.tt