DAVID CUFFY

The sys­tems and pro­ce­dures of gov­er­nance put in place over the last 50 years "forces us to eat, drink, sleep and live frus­tra­tion in dos­es so huge you can't or would not imag­ine." So said Port-of-Spain may­or Louis Lee Sing dur­ing an ad­dress at a func­tion to cel­e­brate the 98th an­niver­sary of the restora­tion of civic au­thor­i­ty to the city of Port-of-Spain, host­ed by the City Cor­po­ra­tion at the Hy­att Re­gency, Wright­son Road, Port-of-Spain, on Wednes­day night. "To sit at a com­mit­tee meet­ing and be told by a se­nior ad­min­is­tra­tor, 'that is how it is, we met it so, it can­not be changed,' con­vinces me that while as a na­tion we have built more plant and ac­quired more hard­ware over the past 50 years, as a na­tion we, in all ar­eas of gov­er­nance, have failed to re-en­gi­neer the most im­por­tant com­po­nent in pro­duc­tion. "We have failed to re-write the poli­cies and pro­ce­dures, the man­u­al, if I may, that guides and man­ages the Pub­lic Ser­vice," he said.

Lee Sing said at every turn rea­sons were ad­vanced why changes could not be made to ef­fect a health­i­er, more or­gan­ised, more hu­man, more ef­fi­cient, more user-friend­ly, more cost-ef­fec­tive and prof­itable so­ci­ety. He not­ed that the "rule book" by which pub­lic ser­vice in­sti­tu­tions op­er­at­ed, made the method­ol­o­gy to dis­ci­pline an em­ploy­ee "a trip to the pin­na­cle of Mount Ever­est sev­er­al times be­fore any­thing is done." He added: "There is lit­tle won­der our city and coun­try has fall­en apart and con­tin­ues to fall apart." The theme of the an­niver­sary cel­e­bra­tions is Pro­fes­sion­al­ism and Ex­cel­lence or Noth­ing. Al­der­man Asha Per­manand pre­sent­ed awards in five cat­e­gories to in­di­vid­u­als and in­sti­tu­tions which, in the opin­ion of the cor­po­ra­tion, re­flect­ed the theme in the way it op­er­at­ed.

They were:

• Busi­ness: Fran­co Siu Chong;

• Com­mu­ni­ty Ser­vice: Richard Fakoory and Queen Street Mosque;

• Ed­u­ca­tion: Jo­ce­lyn Williams;

• Ex­em­plary Ser­vice: Karl Hud­son-Phillips, Sir Learie Con­stan­tine (posthu­mous­ly), Capildeo and Capildeo, Patrick Chokolin­go (posthu­mous­ly); and

• Sport: Ralph Williams.

In ad­di­tion, 50th an­niver­sary of In­de­pen­dence Awards were pre­sent­ed to:

• St Fran­cois Girls' Col­lege;

• Thomas & Sons;

• Trin­pad Ltd; and

• WIT­CO Des­per­a­does Steel Or­ches­tra.

The fea­ture ad­dress was de­liv­ered by Mar­i­ano Brown in which he used, as a metaphor, the de­clin­ing for­tunes of the West In­dies crick­et team to in­di­cate how things change over time. He sug­gest­ed peo­ple look to the past to see how those who came be­fore used pa­tience, dis­ci­pline and hard work to over­come the chal­lenges they faced at the time. Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Min­is­ter Chan­dresh Shar­ma, list­ed on the pro­gramme to de­liv­er an ad­dress, was a no-show. Among those in at­ten­dance were Speak­er Wade Mark, Gov­ern­ment min­is­ters, of­fi­cials of mu­nic­i­pal cor­po­ra­tions, and mem­bers of the diplo­mat­ic corps. Mu­si­cal in­ter­ludes were served by the Ray Hol­man Band, with vo­cal­ist Gyrelle Forbes, and MC du­ties were per­formed by Jem­ma Jor­dan.