A PARLIAMENT FULL OF SHEETS

Nov 09, 2009 Features / Columnists, Tony Deyal column

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Parliamentarians throughout the world are often chided for exhibiting, while at their appointed or elected task, a childish obsession with the trivial and sexual.  However, they reached their nadir in Trinidad last week. According to a report, they talked sheet and more sheet and then continued to talk sheet.
For the record, the report was in plain unvarnished English and not a verbal summary by someone with a Mexican accent.  It was actually an excellent cover story.
What was the sheet talk about?  The Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago recently rebuilt and refurbished the Official Residence free housing in which is one of the perquisites of his office.  The drapes are said to have cost $10 million.  That, however, was not the major bone of contention.  The big ticket item was the cost of the sheets at $3,000 each.
Was it a case of sour drapes?  Would the Prime Minister, having made his bed, now lie on it?  Or is he spending money “free sheet”?
The context of the criticism was that there were people suffering extreme poverty while the Prime Minister enjoyed a “champagne and caviar” lifestyle. The Prime Minister, a born-again Christian confessed recently to being drunk on the Bible.  This makes him a spiritual as well as a spirituous person who both imbibes and imbibles.
One would like to believe that the caviar ascription is fishy and the champagne accusation is full of froth.  However, $3,000 seemed to his political opponents too steep for a cover charge.  Given his oft-quoted statement that when he retires from political life he would become a preacher, Mr. Manning might actually have Canon bedsheets.
In comparison, the President of the United States has a US$100,000 allowance for redecorating the White House when he moves in for the first time. President Obama and his wife Michelle decided to forego the money and paid from their own pockets for the redecorations including chandeliers for their daughters’ rooms ($9,600).  The President is charged for whatever meals he and his family consume outside of official functions.  Michelle Obama is technically unemployed while both the Trinidad Prime Minister and his wife, the Minister of Local Government, earn very high salaries.
Several people who sent the newspaper report to me complained that if the Prime Minister and his wife wanted $3,000 sheets they should spend their own money.  They also suggested that there should be a limit for furnishings and that the PM and his family should pay for their own food.
One of my colleagues made a telling observation.  He asked, “If the sheets cost so much, how much you think the bed cost?”  I told him about the article on a Russian situation that seemed similar to the Trinidad “cover”-up.
Recently, the Russian Government has been forced to publish tenders as part of a national effort to improve transparency and boost public confidence in efforts to cut corruption by holding public competitions for state purchases.  What came up was a tender for a golden bed.
According to the Reuter’s News Service, “Russia’s government has issued a tender for luxury furniture, including a gilded bed, triggering an outcry Wednesday in a country where the economy shrank 10.9 percent in the last quarter.
The Interior Ministry said it wanted a cherry wood bed and that ‘the decorative elements of the head and footboards must be covered with a thin layer of 24 carat gold’.  The total value of the furniture tender was 24.4 million roubles (US$755,900), according to the procurement agency’s site.”
Many Russians supported the complaint of a blogger who wrote, “I cannot imagine the need to purchase expensive items during such a difficult financial situation for the country,”
My friend’s response was, “Maybe the Russian Government buying it as a gift for the Trinidad Prime Minister and his wife!”
Golden beds, ostentation and a taste for luxury got Kwame Nkhrumah of Ghana into trouble.  He came into office with much fanfare and the promise of change.  However, one source said that Nkhrumah slept on a golden bed and another spoke of some of his Ministers doing the same.
Sam Dolgoff in “Africa, Nationalism and The State”, wrote, “Deification of Nkrumah, the cult of personality, exceeded even the homage show­ered on Stalin and Mao. Nkrumah got himself ‘elected’ President of Ghana for life. He boasted, ‘I represent not only Ghana, but Africa and I speak in her name. Therefore, no African can have an opinion differing from mine’….when attending an electoral assembly, Nkrumah made his appearance in an elab­orate tribal dress, carried aloft on the shoulders of six red-turbaned escorts.”
In the Caribbean, Forbes Burnham went the same route and people are already seeing parallels between his behaviour and that of the Trinidad Prime Minister.  Cynical Trinidadians are saying that “escorts” might be too lowly a vehicle for Mr. and Mrs. Manning – they would want BMWs or Benzes.
The Prime Minister managed the potentially embarrassing situation well, slipping adroitly between the sheets and retorting, “At least I’m sleeping in bed-sheets in which I am authorised to sleep.”  The reference, easily picked up by his colleagues, seemed to imply that there were members present who slept in sheets for which they were unauthorised – going undercover so to speak.
According to the report in a Trinidad newspaper, the sheet talk continued, “House Leader Colm Imbert grinned, and seemed to point at an MP sitting not too far from Bharath. “That’s below the belt,” muttered one MP to Manning, as both sides of the House erupted in good natured laughter.”
The way the episode began with what seemed to be a seriousness of purpose and the way it fizzled out proves that nobody really gives a sheet or that they are all merely full of sheet.  There is an expression of people being “four sheets to the wind”.
While the term was originally nautical it came to mean stages of drunkenness, one being just slightly drunk and four being a state of unconsciousness.  Given their attitude, you could say that all the Trinidad politicians, regardless of party, are more than four sheets to the wind.  They are not only unconscious but seem to be drunk on power.
*Tony Deyal was last seen saying that $3,000 sheets prove that every shroud has a silver lining.

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