When Far­ley Au­gus­tine and his team were elect­ed to the House of As­sem­bly there was gen­uine hope that the team, de­spite their rel­a­tive in­ex­pe­ri­ence and would do a good job and bring a new ethos to the po­lit­i­cal en­vi­ron­ment in To­ba­go and by ex­ten­sion to Trinidad. Ex­pe­ri­enced com­men­ta­tors un­der­stood that a breakup with Wat­son Duke was in­evitable. The breakup came and went with rel­a­tive­ly lit­tle fall­out and the team sur­vived rel­a­tive­ly well.

How­ev­er, the leaked tape brought a sharp­er chal­lenge, jux­ta­pos­ing the im­age of fresh­ness with the jad­ed cyn­i­cism of busi­ness as usu­al. Maybe new, but not so dif­fer­ent. Af­ter weeks of ques­tions, un­cer­tain­ty, and al­le­ga­tions sur­round­ing the leaked tape, the Chief Sec­re­tary, Far­ley Au­gus­tine, fi­nal­ly broke his si­lence last Fri­day and con­firmed that the voice on the tape was in­deed his. The three weeks of deaf­en­ing si­lence cre­at­ed a pub­lic re­la­tions void that fed the ru­mour mill and dam­aged the cred­i­bil­i­ty of the Chief Sec­re­tary and his team. Trust takes years to build and can be de­stroyed in sec­onds.

In his de­fence, he said that the tape was one year old and the strat­e­gy to em­ploy peo­ple at pub­lic ex­pense to sup­port the As­sem­bly’s pro­pa­gan­da mes­sage on so­cial me­dia was nev­er im­ple­ment­ed. In at­tempt­ing to jus­ti­fy this ac­tion Far­ley said that the tape was ev­i­dence that the Gov­ern­ment was work­ing for the peo­ple of To­ba­go. “You dis­cuss all the strate­gies, the good, the bad and the ug­ly, the beau­ti­ful, the in­dif­fer­ent every­thing … you look at the pos­si­bil­i­ty” and sleep on it be­fore pro­ceed­ing fur­ther.

One pre­sumes that the Chief Sec­re­tary was not the on­ly per­son in the meet­ing. Leak­ing the tape was in­tend­ed to em­bar­rass the Chief Sec­re­tary and his team mem­bers. There­fore, why didn’t the Chief Sec­re­tary ad­dress the mat­ter as soon as the tape was leaked? Why the wait which al­lowed doubt to fos­ter and al­le­ga­tions of im­pro­pri­ety to deep­en?

One claim is that the in­cum­bents were be­ing “black­mailed” to make pay­ments in re­spect of con­struc­tion work un­der­tak­en on be­half of the House of As­sem­bly. If this claim has any mer­it, then it means that the Chief Sec­re­tary and mem­bers of his par­ty had time to pre­pare a sen­si­ble re­but­tal to ad­dress the like­ly fall­out and ought to have been bet­ter pre­pared to deal with the leak. That the Chief Sec­re­tary and his team were so flat-foot­ed, im­mo­bile, and silent sug­gests that the leak was as un­ex­pect­ed as Far­ley and his team were un­pre­pared.  

The claim that there were cred­i­ble threats against sev­er­al mem­bers of the House over non-pay­ment of the in­voic­es amount­ing to $132 mil­lion is far-fetched. We ac­cept that there may well have been an­gry voic­es over the non-pay­ment and in­flu­ence may have been ex­ert­ed as $132 mil­lion is large for any con­trac­tor, es­pe­cial­ly for a con­trac­tor op­er­at­ing in a small mar­ket. In sum­ma­ry, the en­tire de­fence rests on the stan­dard po­lit­i­cal claim of vic­tim­i­sa­tion and bias.

There are valu­able com­mu­ni­ca­tions lessons here for the po­lit­i­cal new­com­ers along­side some eth­i­cal is­sues. Mis­takes are a fact of life. It is how you re­spond to the er­ror that counts. The main les­son for the Chief Sec­re­tary and his team is they ought nev­er to wres­tle with a pig as every­one will get dirty, and the pig will be in his nat­ur­al el­e­ment.