Trin | Surviving life in Trinidad and Tobago

Rowley: Manning's boasting is not the PNM"s way!

Prime Minister Patrick Manning found himself at the receiving end, yesterday, of the political wrath of the minister he fired in April, Keith Rowley.

In fact, Rowley condemned the statement made by Manning, two weeks ago, in Woodford Square that "if the leader falls, all fall down." Manning made the statement while addressing scores of PNMites who journeyed from various constituencies to show support for Manning while the Opposition's no-confidence motion against him was being debated. But Rowley was not impressed.

"I took careful note of a comment by our Prime Minister last week Friday in Woodford Square, where he told the people gathered there among them the least fortunate of the country, Cepep and similar types all took careful note of the statement that "If the leader falls, all fall."

"That is not the PNM way, and it should never be like that!"

Rowley reflected on when his grandfather became a PNM supporter "because of the policies and programmes that Dr Eric Williams put in place , that converted me from a barefoot schoolboy in Mason Hall, creating the opportunity for mobility from the backwaters of a village to where I am in the Parliament of T&T."

"So PNM must not tell people that your future, your meal depends on me being in office. It can''t be that."

On the issue of inflation, "which has ballooned to 13.5 per cent," Rowley said it "bothered" him that government officials were discounting the issue as trivial.

"Approaching 10 per cent inflation and you get a comment from the top of the Government that the sky is not going to fall, it doesn't do anything for the confidence of those who hire you to do their jobs and it causes concern with people like me who are about to enter retirement.

"Because 15 per cent inflation is the biggest enemy to my quality of life and for the thousands of people in this country who live on fixed income," Rowley said.

Guardian, Tuesday 30th September, 2008

Privileges Committee to probe harassment of Opposition MPs

Parliament’s Privileges Committee will investigate alleged harassment of Opposition MPs by PNM supporters in Woodford Square, Port-of-Spain, on September 12, House Speaker Barendra Sinanan ruled yesterday.
Sinanan ruled in the Opposition’s favour on the matter during yesterday’s Lower House sitting. 

Two weeks ago, Opposition chief whip Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj wrote for the alleged harassment issue to be referred to the Privileges Committee. 

Sinanan said a prima facie case of breach of privilege had been made out by Maharaj on the issue and referred the matter to the Privileges Committee. 

Maharaj sought to make the case that one of the most basic privileges of MPs was infringed that day: the right to freely go to and come unhindered from the precincts of the Parliament. 

Sinanan said the House of Representatives Act prescribes a penalty of summary conviction for “any person who assaults, obstructs, molests or insults any member coming to, being within or going from the precincts of the House, or endeavours to compel any member by force, insult or menace to declare himself in favour of or against any proposition or matter pending or expected to be brought before the Hour or committee.” 

He noted that Maharaj claimed Opposition MPs were verbally abused, molested, insulted and even blocked by persons in Woodford Square. 

Sinanan said: “Although the Tabaquite MP did not provide any specific examples in raising this matter of privilege, if indeed MPs were in any way harassed, on their way to the precincts of this Parliament, then undeniably a breach of parliamentary privilege may have occurred.” (GA)

Guardian, Tuesday 30th September, 2008

Martin Luther King, Jr - our favourite quotes

Whenever we feel sad that we will never be rid of the rule of Patrick Manning and the selfish cult of the PNM and their sheep supporters, whenever we lament that a leader could keep his own people in bondage the way Manning has done to the majority of his supporters, our thoughts turn to Martin Luther King, Jr. The wisdom of his words gives us hope that we can still make our country good and make our people strong educated people, that the night is darkest before the dawn and we are hopeful once again and inspired to continue the fight to rid our country of it's demonic Prime Minister..

A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on the installment plan.

If we are to go forward, we must go back and rediscover those precious values - that all reality hinges on moral foundations and that all reality has spiritual control.

Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.

Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can't ride you unless your back is bent.

Letters: The growing PNM cult in Trinidad and Tobago

Why PNM now seems to be a cult

PNM must now be a cult. It has dogma—its Vision 2020 ideology. It has mentally blind followers willing to support and protect the movement regardless of circumstances.

The movement believes itself to be immortal: “Great is the PNM and it shall prevail.” Its leader believes he is divinely selected to rule. It locks other groups and individuals out of the governance system. It hears its own views only.

One commonality of cults is that they place their survival over and above that of mainstream social interest. Isn’t that what the PNM is about, placing its survival over that of the nation?

Consider the policies on crime, inflation, health, infrastructure development, land and marine farming, housing and urbanisation, transportation, energy monetisation and utilisation, local and central government reform. Are these pursued through national consensus? Are the majority benefiting?

B Joseph

Via e-mail

Guardian Letters Sep25th, 2008

A letter from a legendary writer - Merle Hodge on the PNM's rally

Every Trinbagonian child has had an encounter with the work of Merle Hodge. Her notorious book Crick, Crack Monkey is a permanent fixture in the childhood memories of people throughout our country. We were extremely happy to find a letter from Merle in the recent newspapers. Her letter brought tears of relief to our eyes. We no longer needed to write our commentary about the ridiculous behaviour of the PNM leaders on September 12th 2008 during the Motion of No Confidence against Prime Minister Patrick Manning, or our grief at the way the PNM continues to use and abuse those poor destitute Cepep and URP workers for their demented political whims. She eloquently said everything we wanted to convey, and so here is the letter by our legendary writer Merle Hodge. She truly is one of Trinidad's great thinkers, one of our great leaders.

Govt cannot be trusted after Friday’s PNM rally

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How can we ever again trust anything that comes out of the mouths of those who govern us? What confidence can we now place in their utterances? 

For days we had government ministers and high public officials looking us in the eye and denying that there was a mass event planned for Woodford Square, Port-of-Spain, on September 12. 

One minister swore blind that it was a “spontaneous” response from PNM supporters, angry that their leader was under attack. It was the same minister who swore blind for weeks that there was no dengue outbreak. 

How edifying this has been for our young people, especially the members of the PNM Youth League who might have been directly involved in the mobilisation taking place for three weeks before the event—the printing and distribution of jerseys, flags and banners; the expensive structures going up in Woodford Square; then on the day, the Prime Minister stepping out of the Parliament, wearing a Bible, to hype up the non-existent rally.

 How inspired our children must be when they match up all of this with the bare-faced denials of significant public figures.

 Officials in charge of giving permission for mass public demonstrations, and for the use of Woodford Square, could not remember any application for a PNM rally to be held in the square that day.

 So now any group can spontaneously do its thing in the square, on any day of the year, including Fridays when Parliament is sitting, without asking anybody’s permission. If the ruling party could break the law, who is we?

 Then the Cepep and URP workers who, innocently, in front of television cameras, spoke the truth—that they had been ordered to come to the square, and would be paid for the day.

 No wonder the Government is not interested in any ideas about developing sustainable employment.

Unstable, off-and-on employment, doled out as patronage, allows you to keep people on a short tether, beholden to you for their precarious livelihood.

Then you can call them up whenever you need a show of force to deal with those who don’t agree with you. This is the way to build a private army of potential Tonton (and Tantan) Macoutes.

 Nobody won in that vote of confidence exercise.

 The opposition lost, as it fully expected to, inside the Parliament.

 Across the road, with the spectacle in the square after days of strong denial, the ruling party lost the respect of even more citizens, including some PNM supporters.

 But the biggest loser is the country. The “little rivers” spoken of by ANR Robinson have become a mighty dirty flood, and we are drowning in it, sinking lower and lower.

 Merle Hodge, St Augustine

Letters: Develop Trinidad and Tobago ahead of the rest of the Caribbean

Develop country ahead of region

The Indo-Trinbago Equality Council (ITEC) expresses its shock and amazement with the statement made by Emily Gaynor Dick-Forde, Minister Housing and Planning Development, in Chaguanas.

ITEC is totally appalled by the statement, given the obscene funding by Prime Minister Patrick Manning to our Caribbean neighbours following the natural disasters in the Caribbean. Only recently the Prime Minister gave $27 million to Cuba, Haiti and Jamaica following their calamity.
We recall also that the Government has helped people of Grenada after the hurricane, as well as the people of Louisiana following Hurricane Katrina.

We now find it passing strange that predominantly Indian areas of central and south Trinidad are being actively lobbied by the Government to be self-sufficient in their own aid and recovery, with marginal or no governmental support.

Dick-Forde at the meeting appealed to the central corporate sector to extend its resources to the needy. Dick-Forde asked businessmen to assist in constructing a home for two needy families in Couva North. The Government can assist families in Grenada, Cuba, Jamaica, and St Vincent but cannot assist nationals of T&T.

This abandonment of central and south Trinidad comes on the backdrop of million-dollar overruns on several government projects such as E-Tec, Udecott, the Toruba stadium and others. The neglect has to be described as discrimination by a government against its own people.

ITEC calls on the business and corporate sector to ignore the call of the Government and demand that the Manning administration focuses on putting internal infrastructural development ahead of regional development.

Devant Maharaj
Chairman, ITEC
Guardian Letters Monday Sep 15, 2008

Is this an example of the PNM's plan to punish, marginalize, neglect and frustrate ordinary citizens who the PNM cartel feel are unworthy of having any improvement in their standards of living? Just take a drive from West Trinidad eastward - the difference in the development of the towns and cities as you start heading East and then South onto Central and South Trinidad is obvious.

Under the PNM millions of dollars have been wasted on mega projects such as Tarouba. Is Manning only interested in forming alliances that will help him to maintain his power, and financially rewarding those that tow the PNM party line?

It is sad indeed that everyday we have to fight to get help to make our lives a little better when we are only asking for equal treatment for all trinis!

Yet still monthly Manning and the PNM are spending $6.5 million TT monthly (for a total of $10 Million US$) to build St. Vincent's airport.  Sad and friggin' unbelievable that the PNM is still hellbent on excluding non-PNM supporters from the benefits of new infrastructure.

Manning on Motion of No Confidence - "Tell them leave me alone"

"Referring to the Opposition in a fighting mood (The Prime Minister didn't care to give any truthful contribution to the debate, instead choosing to assemble an army in the Square, deflect any questions aimed at his performance by instead referring to the UNC administration from almost 7 years ago and generally carrying on like a circus clown while perform his war speech) in Woodford Square in Port-of-Spain yesterday afternoon, Prime Minister Patrick Manning told hundreds of his supporters, “Tell them leave me alone.”

Answering the accusation of nepotism  on the basis of appointing his wife to the Cabinet, the Prime Minister pointed to the presence on the opposition side of the House of three Pandays. Incredibly, and unbecomingly, he failed to note that, unlike Mrs Hazel Manning, all three Pandays had individually contested and won election to Parliament."  - The Trinidad Guardian - September 13th, 2008.

Patrick Manning appointed his wife Hazel as Minister of Education after the 2001 election (and during the debate justified this by tallying up the last names of the opposition members, all of whom were fairly elected in a democratic manner). Nepotism in politics occurs when the relative of a powerful figure ascends to similar power seemingly without appropriate qualifications.

When Manning says "Tell them leave me alone" is he implying that we ordinary citizens have no right whatsoever to dare ask him for some accountability? Is our government turning into a dictatorship? Wait a minute, is he (or his army of supporters).... threatening us? 

 The people of Trinidad and Tobago desperately want some answers, Mr. Prime Minister, answers to a few questions about corruption in your administration, to "charges of failure to perform, maladministration, lack of transparency and questionable dealings" and maybe some information on how you plan to fix our country's inflation, crime and education problems. We are not a nation of idiots and we would like some truthful and intelligent answers.

We were aware that the motion of no confidence was not guaranteed to remove the Prime Minister because of the obvious reason that his ruling PNM party has 26 of the 41 seats in the House of Representatives (won with 299,813 votes) while the UNC-A only has 15 seats (won with 194,425 votes, while the COP won not a single seat but received 148,041 votes).

Letters: Only when the last tree has died.

Buy and throw away, hoard your wealth, greed blinds you, we are such a wealthy nation, yet so many of us are still going hungry, so many neglected and struggling - parents who cannot afford healthcare for themselves and their children, single mothers who have to work two jobs to support their families, young adults with no one to parent them, policemen and women risking their lives to protect us in their run down stations, with their scarce equipment and half-assed training. Are you really doing the best you can Prime Minister? Is your regional integration crusade really the best thing for the people of Trinidad and Tobago? Was it really necessary for you to waste so much of our money with your greed induced plan for power? Eric Williams would be ashamed of you. Our families continue to suffer because of your greed and we wish you would just leave and appoint someone more capable and more caring to take your place. We are sick of you Patrick Manning.

Amy, Letters

Caribbean political union?

Here are two letters - thoughts from our citizens about Manning's regional integration crusade. Why can't just a few of these intelligent people that send letters into the newspaper every day ever end up in Government??

REACHING THE POINT OF NO RETURN ON POLITICAL UNION 

It should dawn on any reasonable citizen that PM Manning has pre-empted the yet-to-be-determined verdict of the people of T&T. He has now taken T&T, at enormous public expense, diplomatic hype and great bravado, beyond the political point of no return on his proposed union with at least three other Caricom states. 

He justifies this cart-before-the-horse modus operandi on the basis that a private club of which he is the jefe, that is to say the PNM, some 52 years ago invoked political integration as one of its bye-laws.

 At the legal level, PM Manning has no authority and has acted outside of his political and constitutional remit to have entered into contractual arrangements (MOU), the implementation of which will lead to the dissolution of the current state of T&T, abandonment of its Constitution and jeopardise the viability of the CSME. Any contract that violates the existing Constitution is void.

 This is a clear case not of the coalition of the willing but of the foolish sub-regional unilateralists bent on repeating the mistakes of the political history of the Caribbean of 1958.

 At the political and diplomatic level, PM Manning has assumed such a high and determined leadership profile, evidenced by the frenetic pace of his shuttle diplomacy up and down the Caribbean, that were Trinidadians/Tobagonians to say or allowed to say “no,” there would result such a catastrophic blow to our political reputation and diplomatic credibility in the Caribbean that we will want to seek shelter in shame and ignominy. That is the potential route that Manning is now taking T&T down.

 PM Manning has staked so much of his personal political legacy, presumption and sub-regional standing on the realisation of this fait accompli union initiative that it is likely to undermine, contaminate and detract from the genuineness of his proposed consultative process. That process should in fact have preceded the current multilateral discussions.

 Creeping dictators can under these political challenges degenerate into full-blown tyrants in order to have their political ways, having already dismissed the value of co-operation with the Opposition and committed T&T to ratifying the MOU by year-end. And this while the electorate and Parliament are still to decide.

 The CCJ in fulfilling its original jurisdiction function should be approached, based on the legitimate reservations for Caricom expressed by PM Bruce Golding of Jamaica, to give a legal opinion on whether the MOU infringes or is likely to infringe and retard the commitments already undertaken by the four countries within the ambit of the revised Treaty of Chaguaramas establishing the Caricom Single Market and Economy.

 Will not all of these potential developments make T&T look like having dollars but no political and diplomatic sense once again?

 Stephen Kangal, Caroni, Letters to the Guardian Sep 8th, 2008

 
PM putting cart before donkey

 It is somewhat ironic that our Prime Minister is rambling on about a Caribbean political union at this time when we celebrate our 46th year of independence.

 Prof Vaughn Lewis and Dr Cuthbert Joseph were given a mandate to prepare a road map by the end of this year that would hash out the details and offer concrete models.

 In response to questions from the Trinidadian public regarding what exactly this is all about, Prime Minister Patrick Manning said, with typical arrogance, that “until such time as the report is received, then really it would be premature to be talking about the exact form it will take and so on.”

 Is this not putting the cart before the donkey? Would it not have been more sensible to review what is proposed before flying all over the place talking about political union?

 Those three small island states must be smacking their chops at what their new fairy godfather can bring to their woeful economies, while we Trinidadians are left wondering what are the priorities of our Prime Minister.

 F Khan, St Augustine, Letters to the Guardian Sep 8th, 2008

Letters: Employ professionals to help police officers

The Prime Minister spent $18 Million on travel in 2007, no wonder he has no clue about the common man's daily stress from living in Trinidad. He has just donated $26 Million to neighboring countries affected by hurricane Gustav. What if Manning decided it was urgent to spend $26 Million fixing our roads and bridges and clearing our drains to prevent the flood disasters of last week? Imagine the cost of damage if a hurricane hit us? What if he thought it was important enough to spend $18 Million on improving the police force? Ah to dare to dream...

Rev Dr Michael Friday writes:
A middle-management police officer shoots a non-violent citizen to death. A woman is enraged to find her police officer spouse in a compromising situation with another female in a police station/office.                  
These two recent incidents are among the many that constantly remind us that all is not well within our Police Service. The service is crying out for urgent intervention, both of a spiritual and psychological nature.

Many police departments all over the world employ the services of either chaplains or psychologists. Some do both, as in the case of neighbouring Jamaica. Their Police Chaplaincy Unit has been of              invaluable assistance in developing standards for professional behaviour, personal development, stress management, debriefing and other procedures after shootings of any kind, recruitment, training, promotion and, generally, the development of a new culture within the force.
            
If T&T is supposedly on track to be a developed, first world nation by 2020, we can by no means achieve this with police personnel who ape caveman behaviour. We cannot go on with reactive responses to intrigue within the service. It is high time for the full-time employment of professionals who would help the service rid itself of its potentially dangerous miscreants, and help the many good ones become better professionals and greater people.            

Rev Dr Michael Friday            
Former assistant chaplain-psychologist            
Jamaica Constabulary Force      

Trinidad Guardian, Saturday September 6th, 2008

Depressed at crime and lack of change in Trinidad.

An unprincipled Prime Minister, who turns his back on his common people will continue to alienate Trinidad's citizens. These disenchantment of our citizens has already been widely demonstrated by the lack of support for the proposed new constitution and the alarm and outrage at Manning's proposed Caribbean integration.

One reader wrote:

"Do we live in a political void Trinidad and Tobago?  A great writer once referred to the political process in his fragmented country by saying "during elections, it was out of a desire for self-punishment that they voted for the most wretched parties". Has our devastating history as a nation blindsided us to the extent that we no longer have the energy to demand or create change?

When will Patrick Manning feel shame at his ongoing lavish lifestyle of private jets and island tours while we suffer? Which leader has ever been more out of touch with the people than him, especially the poorest black people who repeatedly support him? It appears that the criminal element feels "material envy" only toward the Indian business owners, as demonstrated by the ongoing kidnappings, under the watch of a wasteful leader. How does one explain this contradiction? Is material envy limited to race alone, with the Prime Minister's lifestyle condoned by the poorest slum dweller while the wealthy Indian population is labeled elitist and deserving of hate crimes and kidnapping?

Don't all hard working people, whatever their race, deserve to reap the benefits of their work without fear of victimization or hate crimes? Are we a country of racist hypocrites? Trinidad and Tobago, when will you ever learn to respect one another?"