It’s still early in the day. Perhaps too early. But tribal and partisan interests, parasitically attracted to tragedy, are already jockeying for advantage, even as neither the flood waters nor the tears they brought have dried.
So, we need to perhaps prepare much more quickly for the larger issues that have emerged, and lift the discourse to higher, arguably safer ground at some stage in the near future. Not now perhaps. People are displaced. There is grief and trauma. But at least some critical issues should be flagged.
In the process, we may well find cause to declare the growing irrelevance of politicians, their surrogates and their anachronistic organisations to the process of reformulating a narrative of development.
Witness, over recent days, the tide of civic compassion and the near marginalising of the amorphous “authorities” to whom we turn at every step – however much we acknowledge their role in the current crisis. If this does not frame a metaphor for political revolt – a recalibrating of power relations, nothing ever will.
But, if or when we finally settle down in the haze of mud turned to stifling dust, there will be important developmental questions to be asked and to be answered. And these questions will have almost nothing to do with public authority and application of its powers and responsibility – which seems to be within the limited range of partisan eyes. These questions will in fact have to do with the application of power lying there to be claimed by the people.
But before we get there, let’s have a look at some core matters related to the crises at hand. They are not exactly headline issues, because they relate to some rather fundamental questions of development as a small island state, and do not necessarily reference the ODPM or litter or dredging or lagoons.
Almost ten years ago while preparing a talk on media coverage of coastal issues in the Caribbean, I came across a rather remarkable statement that can be found in Guyana’s National Development Strategy (NDS) which was inspired and funded by the Carter Centre between 1993 and 1996 and updated in 1999. It was, perhaps, Guyana’s version of our unfortunately ill-fated Vision 2020 document.
Here, among many other things, is what the NDS says: “The ordinary economic activity of the ordinary Guyanese constitutes a continuous threat to the environment.”
It is a conclusion that has haunted me since then. For it provides us with a question we need to ask every time we consider the fate of the Caribbean as a viable space for the exercise of sovereign governance. Never, in the process, have I viewed T&T as being exempt from engaging the question. If anything, it arises more pointedly here than elsewhere in the region.
Could it just be, we may ask, that we need to re-consider our developmental path in the interest of our very survival? It is a big question to encounter in the midst of resolving the current urgent needs. There is no time for all of this now. But let not the ongoing tussle omit its eventual mention.
The other point that comes to mind is a memorable conclusion reached by a team of marine researchers and credited to a presentation by Dr Judith Gobin that “many Caribbean islands … may be considered as ‘coastal zones’ in their entirety.”
In my view, this constituted a reality check for us in small island states such as Trinidad and Tobago.
And even if we are not Barbados or Barbuda or a Bahamian cay, there is a sufficient enough linkage between our ravaged watershed areas and our coastline to suggest that considering a model of development without recognition of this reality would not end very well. The relevance of climate change to all of this is, as well, undeniable.
Yes, the tragic events of the past five days have done much to positively reconfigure a pervasive landscape of hopelessness and futility through the spirit of civic engagement. But they have also offered up some difficult questions we would do well not to ignore.