Heavy rains for more than a week brought deep suffering recently. We had people drowned, swept away by swollen rivers; people stranded in their flooded homes and communities; houses, roads, bridges and other infrastructure destroyed; communities cut off from access to food supplies, clean water, health services and other essentials; the threat of disease prevailing from stagnant and muddy water; and hundreds of farmers with hundreds of hectares flooded, losing large sums in destroyed crops. It was a national disaster.
As it unfolded, you could feel the state collapsing in this country. Better wake up, Trinidad and Tobago. And grow up! An Express editorial said “the best some elected representatives could manage was to stand with frustrated and tearful residents in thigh-deep flood waters and offer moral support to those risking their lives to save their assets”. A picture of impotence, underlining our failed condition.
What about the prime minister? During this national emergency, Rowley was put into Covid quarantine, making a virtual appearance in Parliament to give routine, predictable answers to Prime Minister’s Question Time. Fully re-emerging, the best this man could offer in the wake of a national calamity that brought widespread suffering was a photo of him posing with Sir Viv Richards while golfing and later analyzing West Indies’ cricket failure in Facebook. Trademark Ineligibility.
What about the Minister of Local Government Faris Al-Rawi? Speaking of ordinary emptiness. Shouldn’t this man have the decency to disappear until it is determined whether, as legal experts believe, he criminally misbehaved in public office as attorney general with that scandalous amnesty he signed with disgraced attorney Vincent Nelson? But Rowley and Al-Rawi are the main protagonists in pushing the local government elections, claiming they want reforms, when observers say the administration is hiding from an electorate fed up with their phenomenal incompetence in local government and all other ministries.
The editorial staff of Express reminds us that local government is “where people and the Government meet at the community level” and must “be informed, responsive to needs, sensitive to the plight of the people, demonstrating the capacity to solve problems” . But this administration is more show than substance. Didn’t Rowley, in his first year as Prime Minister, theatrically launch “national consultations” on local government reform? What happened after all the talk and theatrics?
What “job done”, Prime Minister, as claimed in your last egotistical assessment? Instead, we have had a deepening dysfunction, starkly exposed in the recent floods. And, after the “national consultations” of 2016, didn’t we have local government elections in 2018, with the government’s promise of a “new society”? Oh, the sickening emptiness of their deceptive rhetoric! New society?! Here is this stagnant and decaying nation!
The bald fact is that the government has no idea how to move forward with local government reform. Always superficial, they haven’t thought it through. I have said that there can be no meaningful local government reform without the modernization of the entire governance structure in Trinidad and Tobago. You can’t do it piecemeal. You cannot reform local government without parliamentary reform. If you try it, you roll in the mud.
Because reform should mean a greater transfer of power to local government bodies to set their own development agenda in consultation with their respective communities, as well as generate some revenue, all within the framework of national policies of determined by the central government. This means greater power, authority and resources for local government, as well as improved capabilities of councils and councilors to drive development in every corner of the nation.
But to avoid duplication and confusion with parliamentary representatives, you need to take your MPs and Parliament to another level of representation. We must now empower the Parliament with full oversight capacity of Trinidad and Tobago. I say this country is an unsupervised nation because Parliament is absent in action. Parliament, supposedly supreme, representing the people, is currently stretched and largely impotent, the seat of its cabinet and prime minister – a colonial governor reincarnated under our belated Constitution and under whose leadership many mistakes have been made since Independence , squandering the country’s opportunities and resources and with little or no accountability.
In other words, if you want effective local government, you need to rethink your entire governance structure. It means full-time parliamentarians, equipped with the resources and power to oversee this nation, including the cabinet, leading to true separation of powers. Let the Prime Minister choose his Cabinet from the best talent outside Parliament. Allow MPs, as their primary responsibility, through strengthened parliamentary offices and committees, to scrutinize the Government and all its agencies, including the Cabinet and the Office of the Prime Minister, to ensure transparency and accountability and to prevent waste, mismanagement and corruption that continues to destroy this nation. This can encourage more give and take in parliament and foster a spirit of cooperation across party lines, putting the interests of the people first at all times, regardless of which party is in power.
This is the way to make Parliament a true “House of the People” and also to ensure effective local governance. A new political culture may emerge. Then that new society will come.
Ready for it, Trinidad and Tobago? Wake up and grow up, my country! Or different.
