The birds have been loud this past week, singing their hearts out in my garden and this morning before dawn, around the Savannah. I don't know what they are so cheerful about; it must be the mating season? They remind me of certain Trinidadians. I wonder what their partners, the corbeaux, think about this. Come to think of it, where have all the corbeaux gone?
Since their poisoning in Chag, I haven't seen much of them. They must have gone to the Main, better pickings there now that the Chavistas have bullied their way back into power, if only for a couple of years before the Chavismo runs down and the money runs out.
Port-of-Spain is hot, humid, dusty and dirty, the traffic worse than usual and the driving the same. Civility seems to have gone the way of the corbeaux, life insidiously poisoning us. When people see so many things going wrong with little expectation of being corrected, apathy sets in and apathy breeds intolerance and intolerance breeds contempt for others.
There are so many things to correct. From the little things–poor garbage collection or running the red light to poor health care ("we looking into it") and recurrent outages–to the really big criminal misfortunes–the Piarco duo and their desperate fight not to be extradited or Mr Warner and the money for Haiti. Of all Mr Warner's apparent difficulties, if it is true that he appropriated monies meant for the people of Haiti, that is the most unforgiveable. Haiti, he sorry!
Then we have another useless Commission of Enquiry into the Clico commess, which thankfully seems to have run out of something–time, money or lawyers–unless Mr Duprey reconsiders and returns home or the lawyers can come up with another reason to reconvene. There still must be money around for a session or two.
The salient feature of this Commission, apart from the fact that the major players refused to attend and nothing is going to be done about that and nothing is going to come out of the official report (what an indictment of T&T's politico-legal system), is the number of lawyers who were part of the proceedings.
Seventy-seven! Compare that with the number of witnesses: 55. That works out to 1.4 lawyers per witness. What a mess of potty. What have they produced? Apparently over five million pages of something or the other. That's enough toilet paper to supply those waterfront players for a month or so.
If doctors were to treat their patients with the speed that lawyers move and talk, all the patients would be in Lapeyrouse before a single decision made. But I suppose if lawyers moved as fast as doctors have to, the law would be even more of an a-- than it is, although that's difficult to conceive.
The Clico debacle and the subsequent Commission of Enquiry are symptomatic of life in T&T: nasty, low-class and corrupt. Like the late Archbishop Pantin said of drugs, corruption is a cancer in the body, affecting everything. Starting with the big boys at Clico, passing through the so-called regulators, including the Central Bank, the governments who failed to act even though everyone knew what was going on, to the people who bought into the ten per cent dream offered when everyone else was offering one per cent to two per cent, profited and now want their money back with interest, to the media who preferred to talk about Dwight Yorke and Brian Lara and show pictures of a girl being raped, back to the government ministers who then bailed Clico out to the tune of seven billion taxpayers' dollars and set up a useless, toothless Commission of Enquiry with more money spread around to keep people quiet.
In the meantime, open the papers any day and you can happily add to the bacchanal. To paraphrase Manley, drugs and corruption running through the country like a dose of salts. Our infant mortality is the highest in the Eastern Caribbean; women are busy dying in the hospitals during normal childbirths; the education system is failing our children; the Children's Authority Bill is still being studied after 13 years; the Children's Authority itself, four and a half years after being constituted, has not assisted a single child; there is no help for children with reading or writing or behavioural problems; no place for a desperately needed Child Development Centre; shootings every nigh; children eating junk food getting fatter and fatter every year but so-called "food" companies, responsible for a large part of the epidemic of obesity, continue to pontificate about "weight loss" seminars and to hold annual "health" fairs to fool people into thinking they care about your health; the Red House in a mess; President's House a disaster; people park as they wish in the Savannah; the Central Statistical Office has no statistics; Diego Martin waiting for the hills to come down; corbeaux dying, but the birds singing and the Ariapita Avenue rum shops are back with a bang. Or is it with the smell of urine?
