Jyoti Communication: Sticking at the start

I was one of those who urged the new government to move forward with the programmes they had announced in their election campaign, and to try to avoid recriminations and continued criticisms of the vanquished PNM.

Look, I even wrote to those of them whom I knew well enough and told them to try to avoid the mistake of every new government—continually “pongin’” the vanquished for the sins for which we threw them out.

But I must admit that this is a difficult “hope”, and I am not blaming the new government for not moving forward on every front, and for seeming to be dwelling on issues left behind by the PNM.

Simply stated, the government does not have much choice here. There were the issues of which we were all aware—UDECOTT, Guanapo Church, CLICO and crime.

We knew that we were nowhere close to any form of resolution on these scandals, but we hoped that with the new Justice Minister being assigned the task of dealing with the issues arising out of UDECOTT and the UFF Report, other government ministers could concentrate on moving forward.

But good intentions and new zeal notwithstanding, too many other Ministers have discovered problems and issues left for them which require cleaning up before they can devote themselves to moving forward.

In short, the mess left behind by the PNM is far more septic and toxic than even their most dedicated critics could have imagined. This critic included!

During 2007 and early 2008 I visited South several times, and I confess to being impressed with the amount of housing I saw under construction all along the southern extension of the Solomon Hochoy Highway.

Oh, I was aware it was all in Manning’s constituency, and I knew that out near Piarco, and in other places, hundreds of houses were being built. So I thought this might have been a PNM success story.

That was until Keith Rowley was replaced by the robotic Big C Christian Lady in late 2007, and she began to talk about the corruption in the system of handing out the houses.

And that was before Rowley was declared a Wajang and a target for abuse within the PNM! But when Rudi Moonilal was appointed the Minister of Housing and the Environment in the new government, he suffered a rude shock.

Many of those houses were defective! The PNM faithful who were being asked to pay for the houses which were cracking up, leaking through roofs, pipes and sewers and were, in a word, an unmitigated disaster.

So Rudi’s most urgent task is not cleaning the environment, or building new homes for citizens. His job is to clean up a multi-million dollar mess of incompetence and possible corruption left behind by Manning, Dick-Forde and Rowley.

And the new government then discovered that all of those tall new buildings in Port of Spain and San Fernando, although said to be complete, were just empty shells, many months and hundreds of millions of dollars away from occupation readiness.

The hope that various government departments could be installed in these allegedly modern, state-of-the-art buildings is really just an empty dream.

The new government now has to “outfit” all these buildings while government departments all remain in cramped, unsuitable rented space—much of this space rented from friends under brand-new contracts signed up by the outgoing PNM.

But we will hear from the remnants of the PNM in the coming months that the new government has not moved into these empty, unserviceable buildings!

And then we had new Minister of Works and Transport Jack Warner discovering that his predecessor, arrogant, impish, and certainly incompetent Colm Imbert, had a boat named Su tied up in various dry docks, absorbing millions of dollars in ongoing repairs.

This was one of Imbert’s fast ferries, a project of which he loved to boast, but which was another expensive example of gross incompetence and possibly corruption. His Ministry purchased a broken down ferry which is costing more to repair than it cost to buy.

That, the CR Highway dualling fiasco and the collapsing infrastructure all need to be cleaned up or fixed before real progress can begin.

And it’s everywhere: Unbuilt hospitals, clogged drains, and unpaid bills, all preventing, and possibly designed to prevent, the new government from developing its agenda.

This government needs to establish work centres, probably under the Ministry of Justice, to “take over” all of the needed investigations and fix what is broken, and to devise the strategies to sell, lease or occupy all those new buildings and that boat named Su.

When all of this clean-up work is assigned then we can see the government move to their agenda. Not before!