A good Government’s punishment

Sep 13, 2015 Letters

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Dear Editor,
THE 2015 general election in Trinidad & Tobago has brought to the fore a few very clear and unmistakable truths.
The people of Trinidad & Tobago are satisfied to be gullible; the national media is more brutal at politics than the politicians, and people are more inclined to believe what they hear, rather than find information for themselves.
The fall of the Kamla Persad-Bissessar administration is an anomaly that requires deep and thorough analysis. It is one of those rare moments when a Government that genuinely served its purpose, represented the diversity of its people, listened to ideas and consulted, outperformed all Governments of the last 50 plus years, was punished for it.
The analysis required of this anomaly cannot be done by local ‘experts’, many of whom smack of intellectual dishonesty in the extreme. Some of them even chant the ‘unity’ chorus even as they conspire against it by fanning the flames of racial divisions.
Trinidad & Tobago is one of the few nations where analysts and experts are all too willing to sell their intellectual ‘wares’ to the highest bidder. The media is no different, content to fiercely defend a fictitious ‘journalistic’ integrity and ‘independence’ while vigorously preventing anyone from monitoring or questioning them.
The political expert and media industries in Trinidad & Tobago are far from democratic; in fact the symptoms of fascism are startling, seeing it as their right to demand transparency, while rigidly operating behind iron curtains.
So what does the result of the 2015 general election come down to? Simple – marketing, and capitalising on the slothfulness of a spoilt electorate. A look at the campaigns tell that story.
Keith Rowley’s campaign was underlined at every turn with the sentiment – ‘they are bad, kick them out’.
Many would remember his famous line: “What I stood for yesterday, is what I stand for now, and what I will stand for in the future.” It told the story of a man who was not about the change, and rejected the need to evolve.
To Keith Rowley, great was his party, not the country, and it seemed he took this as permission to make some of the most vile and crude political speeches in our political history.
His speeches were punctuated with the colloquial reference to a woman’s private parts; descriptives such as being “raped by an umbrella, and opening the umbrella after”.
He defiantly refused to apologise for lewd dancing and inappropriate behaviour with an underage school girl, and faced a number of other allegations of sexual misconduct which he appeared to adopt as a badge of honour.
By election night, the nation had no idea of his economic plan, his strategies to continue economic diversification started in the past five years, his ideas for empowering a large number of people so that they can life themselves out of poverty…nothing.
The sum total of his campaign was that “they bad, kick them out”, punctuated by wild allegations, hysterical rambling and fabricated claims of wrong-doing.
Kamla Persad-Bissessar’s campaign was underlined by a plan, and having a vision for where the nation must go if it is to succeed in an increasingly demanding and hostile global environment.
Yes, she fought Rowley toe to toe and challenged him on a number of fronts. What was his record of achievement? What was his plan? What was his vision? What public spending would he cut?
Based on the progress she made in her first five year term, she outlined a clear roadmap to harness the natural and human resource wealth of Trinidad & Tobago to advance us to developed nation status.
She also reminded the nation that hers was the first Government to commit itself to its manifesto by adopting it through Parliament; and worked to deliver almost every promise she made.
A distant voice of a man called Jack Warner kept gnawing at her heels, and with each allegation become more putrid and abhorrent.
Kamla defended him from the start, taking blows for allowing him to sit in her Cabinet while holding his senior Vice Presidency at FIFA. Yet amid his allegations, he claimed that he made her who she was.
But the campaigns are now over; gullible Trinidad & Tobago must now live with the mistake they made when they voted.
If leaked budget documents from Keith Rowley are anything to go by, within the next 12 months, poverty will rise, crime will increase, kidnappings may return, the most vulnerable will have the little they have ripped away from them, and students depending on State support for their education will be thrown into a quandary of not being able to afford to educate themselves.
If the leaked documents are true, pensioners are also on the chopping block, with Keith Rowley intended to revert an assured pension to an Old Age pension grant, which gives discretion to Rowley and his Cabinet.
This move demonstrates like no other that fact that Rowley and the PNM have come back to office with the intention to discriminate, disenfranchise and scare people into silence, for fear of reprisals if they speak out.
And there are facts now that we must monitor to get a good sense of exactly how dark a future Trinidad & Tobago faces.
Government revenue by the time the PNM left office in 2010 was $39 billion; by 2015 it was $60 billion. By the time the PNM left office, $400 billion cumulatively had been spent and borrowed, and the tail-end in 2010 brought with it numerous mega-projects incomplete, over-budget and contractors unpaid billions.
By the time Kamla Persad-Bissessar left office, $288 billion was spent with evidence of advancement in every corner of Trinidad & Tobago, including universal pre-school, a university campus in south and Tobago, and an energy sector that was starting to boom again.
The next five years will tell the story of where Trinidad & Tobago goes. And if Rowley and the PNM remain true to form, they will attempt to destroy the legacy of Kamla Persad-Bissessar, for the simple reason that they have none of their own.
And what is that legacy? In five years, Kamla Persad-Bissessar:
(i) Proved that a Government can backdown on policies if stakeholders have concerns, she listened to the people;
(ii) Transformed education, achieved tertiary participation of over 65% and successfully delivered a technological platform for the secondary school system;
(iii) Achieved unprecendented progress for the protection and wellbeing of children;
(iv) Changed the face of rural Trinidad & Tobago, giving people new pride in their communities;
(v) Delivered promises of infrastructure development that were made and broken for up to 50 years;
(vi) Delivered the first ever Specialist Children’s Hospital in the region;
(vii) Negotiated more lucrative bilateral trade agreements that any other Government in our history;
(viii) Transformed the investment environment, achieving the highest levels of foreign direct investments in Trinidad & Tobago’s history;
(ix) Finally started the process of constitution reform to deliver power to the hands of people;
(x) Reformed Local Government to vastly increase the powers of municipal authorities and people;
(xi) Vastly improved the circumstances of the poorest with Housing and Land for the Landless;
(xii) Completely changed the fact of Skills Training and Technical Education with hundreds more programmes that are in line with the modern interests of young people;
(xiii) Delivered Trinidad & Tobago’s first Aviation and Drilling Academy;
(xiv) Restored an ailing energy sector with more exploration and production taking place than in the last 30 years, while at the same time achieving deep sea exploration for the first time ever;
(xv) Created the economic environment and conditions for the most small business start-ups ever, in a five year period;
(xvi) Successfully held together a diverse coalition Government; an arrangement that failed to survive beyond two years on two previous occasions;
(xvii) Stands out as the only Prime Minister to have so consistently stood against corruption and wrong-doing, having fired numerous Ministers, despite longstanding relationships;
(xviii) Delivered the San Fernando to Point Fortin highway that was first promised by the PNM in 1961, and
(xix) Made Trinidad & Tobago the first nation on the planet to achieve universal pre-school education;
(xx) Increased the Heritage Stabilisation Fund by over 55 percent, ensuring that tomorrow’s generation is financially secure.
And, despite being a fraction of the former Prime Minister’s achievements, all of these things were delivered inside of a 5-year term, far exceeding the delivery of PNM Governments over a 20 year period.
Gerald Vincent

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