The Bobolee syndrome - the Peter O'Connor column

I must admit that when I saw PSA members “beating the bobolee” which depicted Watson Duke, I was appalled. 

Not at the fact that a bobolee was being beaten, but at the ferocity of the licks, and the dragging of the dummy into the street to encourage vehicles to run over it. 

Someone watching with me wondered what little children would think of the rage and violence. I wondered what might have happened if Duke himself had arrived on the scene. Would they have mercilessly beaten him too?

This episode was of course followed by a series of bobolee beatings across the land, demonstrating our inability to deal with current situations other than by resorting to blind, ineffective rage.

But this is all part of the current trend in our affairs. The actual bobolee beatings merely highlight the ongoing, and far more sinister, virtual bobolees being beaten in Parliament, in the media and in various political pronouncements. 

They are all part of the continuing efforts to handicap and destabilize the current government, by keeping them from doing the work of the country.

How can they really settle down to work? 

Every day there is some new charge leveled at the government, or at some minister. And every charge laid, followed by “ooohs and ahhhs” from a gullible public, is then refuted by the government. 

But the stain remains, and that is the stain of the bobolee. 

And the media unfortunately permits these bobolee politicians to cry down all these alleged and unproven faults of the PP government, but never ask “Why did you not object to that when you were in government, and the same thing was going on?” 

Rather the media seems to support the PNM claims that they had some level of integrity while in office.

When Manning stood in Parliament last October, with his poster pictures of Kamla’s new house, which he claimed was bigger than the Diplomatic Centre and cost over $150 million, he was presenting his bobolee, which he continues to beat to this day, notwithstanding the facts which showed the cost of the building. 

So he is now, quite correctly, facing the Privileges Committee for deliberately misleading the house.

But since Manning threw his bobolee on to the House floor, several others have been cast at the feet of the government: “They shutting down URP, ending CEPEP, closing GATE”, and almost every other social programme. 

These accusations of the PNM are all subsequently denied, but the denials come in lesser headlines on back pages, and the ignorant, who believe in bobolees, continue to accept that the government is taking advantage of them. 

The PNM knows, better than most of us, that a lie repeated often enough “becomes the truth”. Republicans in the USA, now repeating that President Barrack Obama is not American born, also understand this.

But the Kamla’s house bobolee was a joke compared with what Keith Rowley threw on the Parliament floor recently. 

In his attempt to make political gain arising out of the current ethnicity and numbers controversy, Rowley announced that he had information that AG Anand Ramlogan, on a visit to the T&T Embassy in New York, had complained that not enough Indians worked there, and had asked for the “ethnic breakdown” of staff there.

Well, you should have heard all the “oohs and aahs”, everyone wondering how Anand could have done such a thing! How indeed? 

It was then revealed that Anand Ramlogan had never visited our embassy in New York, and therefore never made such comments. Instead of Rowley admitting that he had been caught in a lie, he left the bobolee rotting in the road, claiming it was not he, but the person who gave him the false information, that was wrong!

Rowley needs to be brought before the Privileges Committee, less for misleading the House than for the level of ignorance displayed in his attempted rebuttal. 

And here is my challenge to Rowley: I say no one told you this, you made up the lie in order to have a bobolee to beat in the House!

Clearly, the remnants of the PNM, splitting further within itself, are seeking to have themselves banned by the Privileges Committee from future sittings of the House. When this happens, they will hit the road, claiming martyrdom and littering our lives with more “bobolees” of their own imaginations.

Let us recognize all of these bobolees for what they really are: Imaginary, childish distractions from the work needed to bring our country back from the abyss to which the PNM took us, an abyss to which the PNM wishes to return. 

Business people who finance political parties should deny funding to bobolee politicians and parties, for the common good of the country.

But will they have the courage?