On race day, in the sport of horse rac­ing, a sud­den heavy down­pour is so game-chang­ing, it sends even the re­li­gious­ly clin­i­cal pun­ters scram­bling to cov­er their bets. Ask any book­ie, they'd con­firm that F and G-class hors­es and those who tend to bolt, come in­to their own on mud­died tracks be­cause their hooves are over­sized, not well-pro­por­tioned.

So on­ly where there's a mucked-up plat­form can they trounce the bet­ter hors­es in the field. A Guardian news re­port by Yvonne Ba­boolal has me think­ing the THA elec­tion was noth­ing more a down­pour, be­cause, sud­den­ly, a re­li­gious fig­ure has start­ed to prat­tle about some proph­esy he got to in­di­cate it fore­tells of greater and sus­tained out­pour­ings favourable to a man known more for his bull­ish be­hav­iour than equine sleek­ness.

The fact that the cler­ic couldn't/didn't proph­esy be­fore the THA elec­tion calls his God­ly con­nec­tions and in­ten­tions in­to se­ri­ous ques­tion for, as I un­der­stand it, God doesn't put such fu­tur­is­tic thoughts in­to peo­ple's heads af­ter a down­pour, al­ways be­fore. Mean­time, as with every down­pour, the sun af­ter­wards reap­pears and grad­u­al­ly warms the land­scape so those with prop­er poise can re­sume the lead­ing role.

Ay­o­dele Chieng,

Pe­tit Bourg