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The contract game

Newsday Editorial

THE conduct of the UNC administration in handing out contracts to scores of party supporters and/or financiers has been roundly condemned by this newspaper. In fact our position on what we were convinced was absolute corruption so angered then Prime Minister Basdeo Panday that he virtually declared a jihad on us. He called not only for a boycott of the newspaper but a boycott of those who advertised with us.

The fact that the public would first have to buy the newspaper to find out who its advertisers were, seems to have been lost on Mr Panday. However, the boycott call was ignored by a discerning public and we are here today to see the unfolding in the Commission of Inquiry into the Piarco Airport Project of a scandal that has robbed the country of more than a billion dollars. It is certain that more revelations are to come.

The United National Congress Government had imposed a cluster of freeloaders on the public purse, all of them at salaries and perks scandalously in excess of those decided, for comparable jobs, either by the Salaries Review Commission or through negotiations with the relevant bargaining bodies. But many people had to put their finger in the wound before they believed, but in the end the UNC paid the price in loss of office.

We say this now not because we like to repeat ourselves, but as a warning to the present People’s National Movement Government that they should pay close attention to what the public is viewing as cronyism and wasteful spending. Today, the PNM Government appears falling into the same contracts mode it had exposed and campaigned against when the UNC was in power. Successive PNM administrations had themselves indulged in naked cronyism, patronage and waste until removed from office in 1986 by the National Alliance for Reconstruction.

They did so even as they spoke of morality in Government and public affairs. There appeared to be a respite, when the Party returned to power in 1991-1995. Today, however, the current PNM Administration, even as it establishes Commissions of Inquiry to investigate corruption under the last regime, is itself guilty of seeking to circumvent established employment procedures and to pretend to be unaware that the CEO in a loss making enterprise that is not even satisfying public needs was being paid $50,000 a month plus perks.

Ironically, the Commission of Inquiry into the Piarco Airport project which has been going on since August last year and is daily displaying the evidence of corruption under the UNC, is retaining high priced attorneys because of a great shortage in the Attorney General’s department. Why has government failed to fill several permanent vacancies in this department? Surely if the Government had set about appointing its own attorneys, and it could have done so over the last 13 months, taxpayers would be spared having to pay high priced lawyers in this highly publicised inquiry.

It is this same approach that the present Administration, while in Opposition, had in essence attacked in its exposure of glaring short term employment contract officers at National Flour Mills and all too many other State Enterprises by the UNC. Were the exposures and condemnations genuine or were they merely political ploys aimed at assisting in removing the UNC from office?

The public, which can do without the tasteless exhibition of double standards is growing increasingly cynical at what it is seeing and hearing.

Trinidad and Tobago News

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