Some peo­ple have on­ly now re­alised that Patrick Man­ning is a hu­man be­ing. It's a pity though that it took a se­ri­ous ill­ness to bring about this feel­ing, fleet­ing as it might be. Like all hu­man be­ings, Man­ning made some er­rors of judg­ment. I am no apol­o­gist for Man­ning, Kei­th Row­ley or Kam-la Per­sad-Bisses­sar, but like all de­cent cit­i­zens I of­ten won­der where is the re­spect that is due to our for­mer Prime Min­is­ter. In de­mo­c­ra­t­ic coun­tries all over the world, for­mer lead­ers are treat­ed with re­spect. For ex­am­ple, in the US Pres­i­dents Nixon, Rea­gan, Clin­ton, Bush etc are not vil­i­fied and ma­ligned. What are we teach­ing our young peo­ple?

Man­ning has been blamed for every ill in this so­ci­ety. In­stead of blam­ing him for crime which the present ad­min­is­tra­tion has ad­mit­ted can­not be solved by one per­son or ad­min­is­tra­tion, or blam­ing him for the colour of the road, why don't we blame Man­ning for chang­ing the land­scape of Port-of-Spain? Why don't we blame him for the Hy­att and up­scale wa­ter­front area which we can­not get enough of? Why don't we blame him for the ex­quis­ite NA­PA build­ings in North and South, the pop­u­lar wa­ter taxi ser­vice and the overused Diplo­mat­ic Cen­tre? Why don't we blame him for the nu­mer­ous ed­u­ca­tion and so­cial pro­grammes, some of which have been un­cer­e­mo­ni­ous­ly elim­i­nat­ed? Speedy re­cov­ery, Man­ning.

Jan­ice Fred­er­ick-Sealy

Freeport