Last night I narrowly avoided being swept away by a yellow flood. My gut reaction to the carnivalesque gathering on the Eastern Main Road in St Augustine, which had spilled over from the Massy supermarket car park where our incumbent Prime Minister was pledging herself to the faithful, was to flee.
Admittedly my response would have been the same had I been confronted by a PNM rally. It wasn't the political nature of the fired-up throng, some skanking in the road to the tritely glib "Forward ever backward never" lyrics of the UNC/COP/PP anthem belting out from the stage, but the partisan gung-ho liquor-fuelled head, which chilled me.
I don't like crowds, which can quickly transmute into trampling mobs and the election campaign conducted by all parties has left me detached and disturbed. In some ways it's fortunate that I can't vote, even if I wanted to, although this didn't stop the PM sending me an email ( I suspect along with every other "resident" with an e-mail address), soliciting my support.
Sitting at the side of the road watching the predominantly Indo UNC faithful streaming by in their expensive party jerseys and waistcoats I couldn't help be struck by the irony of the pappyshow. I haven't experienced the PNM version yet and hopefully won't, but from the general tenor of the campaign I doubt there's much difference.
The civic-minded and nationalistic and those who support the chimera of democracy might want to level a charge of cynicism at me. As one who is not eligible to vote–(despite having lived here since 1987, with a five-year hiatus from 2002-7) what right do I have to comment on or criticise the due electoral process? As a long term resident, taxpayer, educator and journalist, with a legitimate Trini family and as a human being who has regarded T&T as home for many years, I'll risk all charges, whether of cynicism or being apolitical.
What struck home last night amid the rhetoric of success, victory, achievement and a gilded future was the discrepancy of the reality we must all face on a daily basis. Which is why I referred to the rally as a pappyshow. Being bludgeoned on the road, or even in the supposed privacy of one's home by the strident voices of the power-hungry, veering from invective to hyperbolic vainglory, being assaulted by newspapers carrying more PR than solid copy cannot conceal the chasm between the talk and the walk.
For example, we now have a new children's hospital in Couva. I wonder if it's as state-of-the-art as Napa, which after $500 million and five years after being commissioned, is now unusable. The Couva hospital will need a staff of 2,500 and so it will be commissioned "in phases," because amazingly while all the construction was going on, it apparently escaped everyone's notice that this splendid world-class edifice would need personnel. I'm not sure of the exact time frame involved in the construction, but surely two years at minimum should be long enough either to source medical and ancillary staff at home, or advertise abroad.
Those of us who have accessed public health institutions will be aware of existing staff shortages, nurses and especially doctors are in short supply. So unless our existing hospitals, and health centres are to be further depleted when staff are seconded to Couva, the spanking new children's hospital like the Tarouba Stadium, the Eric Williams Medical Centre of old, the numerous empty skyscrapers adorning our capital and the vast and now useless Napa will become yet another white elephant–or even a pappyshow.
Construction contracts are the El Dorado of postmodern T&T. They enormously benefit a few at the expense of the many. If we are really attempting to build a nation, rather than shoddy edifices, our culture of procurement and tendering needs serious investigation and restructuring. But the party of all political parties continues, with the connivance of the real power brokers, to whom yellow or red are mere distractions from the business of business as usual.
While the bluff, huff and puff reach crescendo the next ten days or so I can't help but think about Carifesta, now underway in Haiti. The regional arts festival has received minimal local coverage, due to our immediate concerns. I don't know of any local journalist who's been sent to cover Carifesta; hopefully I'm wrong, but otherwise I guess it's another case of complete indifference to our regional future and development and the arts in general.
What we could bear in mind as we blindly speed toward September 7, is that the legacy of the Haitian Revolution (true liberty and equality) which could have been the beginning of a whole new world in the New World, has been largely hijacked by a small elite of power brokers, who have bled their nation dry and dusty, while they maintain extravagant lifestyles and an iron grip on the economy.
Politicians and their pappyshows will come and go across the Caribbean but the gatekeepers of El Dorado will never cede an inch.