The re­sponse of the ODPM's CEO Dr Stephen Ram­roop to ques­tions about the or­gan­i­sa­tion's spend­ing is if any­thing more trou­bling than the ex­pen­di­ture it­self.In the face of ques­tions from the Sun­day Guardian, Dr Ram­roop could not an­swer ex­act­ly how much was be­ing spent on leas­ing a trail­er truck and trans­port bus, but promised to sup­ply de­tailed in­for­ma­tion af­ter it was re­quest­ed un­der the Free­dom of In­for­ma­tion Act.

Now, the dis­as­ter pre­pared­ness boss is said to be in­ves­ti­gat­ing the "leaks" which led to in­for­ma­tion about ODPM spend­ing com­ing to the at­ten­tion of the pub­lic.That's an un­for­tu­nate at­ti­tude to take. Of all the mem­bers of the Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Coun­cil, Dr Ram­roop and the Of­fice of Dis­as­ter Pre­pared­ness and Man­age­ment are the on­ly par­tic­i­pants who can and should be to­tal­ly open and ac­count­able in their op­er­a­tions, rather than hunt­ing down the source of sup­pos­ed­ly "sen­si­tive" in­for­ma­tion.

In­deed, the state of the ODPM is of such crit­i­cal im­por­tance to T&T that trans­paren­cy in its op­er­a­tions should be re­flex­ive rather than re­quest­ed.Among oth­er things, there were not un­rea­son­able queries about the num­ber of body bags Dr Ram­roop had re­port­ed­ly or­dered, which puz­zled and not sur­pris­ing­ly alarmed some cit­i­zens–did Dr Ram­roop fore­see that there might be 12,500 fa­tal­i­ties in some im­mi­nent nat­ur­al dis­as­ter? What did he know that the rest of the coun­try didn't?

http://www.guardian.co.tt/dig­i­tal/new-mem­bers