By Raffique Shah
July 13, 2008
As if this country is not burdened by more than its fair share of woes, I don’t know if I should laugh or cry over expressions of outrage by those who see the sky caving in on Trinidad and Tobago because government postponed Local Government elections for the third time. What, pray, is the big fuss over staging local elections? The municipalities and corporations continue to exist-note I did not say function-as they always have, elections or no elections. In other words, they did nothing to benefit citizens during their official tenure. And they continue to do nothing as they await reforms promised by the Government since 2002.
Continue reading Abolish Local Govt
I just had to comment on last Sunday’s Express article by Ms Sheila Rampersad in which she expressed her great disappointment over Education Minister Esther Le Gendre’s attack on Mickela Panday in Parliament.
The following headline was blazoned across the July issue of The Anglican Outlook: “Hundreds say Farewell, Canon Griffith,” the former pastor of St. Clement’s Anglican Church. The photograph that accompanied the story showed his colleagues carrying his casket to its final resting place. Bishop Calvin Best presided at the Holy Eucharist while Lystra Bernice Griffith Brown, the canon’s daughter, delivered the eulogy.
I was in employment in the Public Service during the period when the meritocracy factor slowly and surreptitiously began to assert itself as the preferred alternative criterion to seniority as the determining consideration to effect promotions. This development constituted as an aspect of Performance Management in Public Service Reform. 
T&T is not a failed state; it is a state whose socio/economic policies, ineffective leadership and lack of vision is failing its citizens. It is a state which has consistently failed to effectively integrate large sections of the African and East Indian populations into the wealth creating mechanism that would give them a stake in the country. This failure manifests itself in misdirected values, social deviance, questionable morals and increasing violence. Consequently, with the exception of the elite, a struggling middle class and an increasing number of foreigners, the great majority of citizens in this small but oil rich nation remain poor; marginally more than hewers of wood and drawers of water.
Police were on a manhunt in Central Trinidad last night, after another toddler was murdered.
Where do the neophyte Ministers of the PNM regime get the idea that taxpayers’ money is not taxpayers’ business? Was this what they were taught at their retreat last year, which was also at taxpayers’ expense, to learn about their responsibilities? Or are they merely falling into the easy contempt with which politicians too often treat the citizens of this country?
The news that the United States still officially included former South African President Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC) on its terror watch list and that the US Senate only moved last week to correct this absurdity has come as a shock and eye opener to many.