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Carlos John's Arrogance
Posted: Tuesday, August 13, 2002

Unveiling Private Sector Arrogance

I rued the pathetic picture of the MP for St. Joseph, Mr Carlos John, Mr Nice Guy, bedecked in sartorial, bearded elegance displaying his inimitable brand of private sector arrogance to the Press. He unconvincingly tried to rationalise and promised an encore of his flagrante delicto of the collective wisdom of the past represented by the checks and balances instituted by Parliament to control the disbursement of the public purse. This is clearly symptomatic of the laisser faire modus operandi that underpinned the machinations of the previous regime.

Each day the media "busses" another mark that unveils sordid details of the amazing, dramatic reckless epic katha of what passed for "performance beating ole talk" at astronomical prices but which was nothing less or more than a well lubricated and financed PR machinery that invaded the coffers of national patrimony like a cancer and ravished the body public.

Here was the former high priest of the "prayerful" conglomerate (a la Maharaj) who was recruited from the secrecy - prone ambience of the private sector where public scrutiny is non-existent. He was laser beamed as the brightest comet illuminating the UNC firmament and strode UNC stages like an instantaneous mighty colossus. But sadly his arrogance precluded him from making the requisite private- to- public sector adjustment or did he copycat his penchant for the abuse of the public purse from the "Build the Damn School" in Biche syndrome?

Yet Mr John boasts of being more gifted that any PNM Cabinet member even though he intentionally approved illegal allowances to public servants when he possessed no such competence. He also usurped the role of his PS.

Mr. John has helped the public to disabuse their minds of the orchestrated myth that private sector gurus are superior to over-worked, under-paid public sector managers even though he emancipated himself from being indebted to banks while in the private sector to an overnight public sector status possessive of enormous liquidity.
He is neither the first nor the last to make a quantum leap from the private into the public sector and prove to be an unmitigated disaster. Compare the level of expensive non-performance that former Ambassador Michael Arneaud of the T&T Chamber of Commerce visited on our Embassy in Washington and then faded into the sunset.

One has to be at the receiving end, as I have been since 1986, to appreciate the harrowing experiences that private sector arrogance, based on- know -it- all, has inflicted in the regulated public, scrutinized domain.

Stephen Kangal
CARONI



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