This is not a fete in here This is madness! -David Rudder circa 1988
Even by Trinidad's topee-tambo standards, which allow a Carnival fete to resume after a man is stabbed to death in front of the stage, the whole fete posse frenetically jumping up and wining down in the pool of his blood, the last week or so has been impressive. Your average cynical newspaper columnist barely had time to register astonishment over the First Citizens board of directors bending over backwards to give its departing CEO $10 million extra it had no obligation to pay whatever-and the new Minister of Finance actually taking it, firetruck the public and the Integrity Commission, let them think what they want!-before the new Minister of National Security (the old FIFA corruption scandal-ducker) was pussonally leading an attack against a band of criminals posing as university professors peacefully protesting the route of a necessarily ecologically-damaging highway. You could have "dead with laugh" over the first charge of the reformed Flying Squad (obviously capable of new lows), made up of two Cabinet ministers, the chief of defence staff, the commanding officer of the army and a whole heap of soldiers who, on the day, appeared to actively take over the role of the police present to do a job-one hesitates to say, "put down a wuk"-the police themselves might properly have refused.
Dr Wayne Kublalsingh, whose crime seems to be to care more about Trinidad's ecology than its Indians, was bodily lifted by two soldiers and carried away, but the professor can count himself luckier than the last ecology-minded protester who sat in the way of a construction vehicle on state-which is to say, "probably-illegal-and-certainly-unethical-but- executive government-backed"-business. Those with memories that go back longer than the last election, and which band of bandits snatched the Treasury that time, will recall Eden Shand, who himself lost a Cabinet post for telling the truth about the destruction of Trinidad's mountainsides by slash-and-burners and bench-and-builders, sitting down behind a Mack truck when Carlos John mobilised overnight a fleet of construction vehicles to pave part of the Savannah in a single morning. (And who could have predicted, when he was defacing a public green space with such private sector efficiency, that Carlos John would seem, in just a few short years, utterly restrained in comparison with today's man of action?) Where Dr Kublalsingh escaped his brush with the outlaws of the Ministry of National Security with only a bruise or two to his person and the laughable charge (laid by the Minister of National Security, not by a police officer before the magistrate) that Kub-lalsingh struck a police officer, Shand had five cubic yards of gravel dumped on him, and an excited call to "bring the hot mix fast."
But, before your laughing fit could have subsided over our own Jack of All Tirades running rough-shod over the Constitution to prove himself the Prime Minister's "man of action" (never mind the results, just look at the action!), you had to stand back, and then step back, and then step back some more to stand back and look up and only then look into the face of Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar being lifted high in the air by Shaquille O'Neal, the figurative and literal American basketball giant. Shaquille O'Neal was flown into Trinidad-at what cost, God and the new Minister of Finance alone know-to prove to black Trinidadians how easily they can be duped, or at least how easily their government thinks they can be-and this is not an Indian thing, it's a Trinidadian thing. Hoop of Life, the name given to this quarter's version of Colour Me UNC, is a basketball shooting competition (not even an actual basketball competition!) in which the State is putting up for grabs by community teams three cash prizes of a quarter of a million dollars for the third-placed team, half a million dollars for second and a cool million for the winner.
It is yet another handout scheme, though a marginally more cleverly designed one than, say, Cepep or URP, through which state funds that might be used for, say, building schools or child day care or adult literacy centres, or even for fixing potholes, are instead handed over to "community leaders." The only difference between earlier schemes like giving out contracts for painting housing plannings or trimming the grass at the edge of the road is that participants in the feeding frenzy are not even required to pretend to work; it is enough that they pretend to play. So, if anyone needed any proof that Trinidad is a play-play country, they got it in spades in the last ten days. You have the Minister of National Security picking up the phone and calling out his pardner, the chief of defence staff, who in turn calls out his pardner, the commanding officer, and then they all fall een by the highway camp to knock down some tent and knock back some puncheon, presumably, and then dash back to town to dress up and rub shoulders with and bask in the reflected glory of a foreigner who really achieved something. Don't look for real government, here, look for the field slaves raiding the Great House. After all these years, the best we can do is make a pappyshow of what a real people would do.
BC Pires is giving Shaquille O'Neal slam dunk tips. E-mail your panties of hope to him at bc@caribsurf.com
