This week has start­ed off with a se­ries of protests by res­i­dents in south Trinidad as they seek to high­light the poor con­di­tion of their roads and the lack of a prop­er pipe-borne wa­ter sup­ply from the Wa­ter and Sew­er­age Au­thor­i­ty (WASA).

Of course, nei­ther prob­lem is new. Is­sues with poor road­way in­fra­struc­ture and wa­ter sup­ply—some­times both con­nect­ed due to in­ef­fi­cien­cies in how WASA fix­es leaks and re­stores the road sur­faces they dig up—have been peren­ni­al prob­lems that of­ten bring such protests across the coun­try.

How­ev­er, those protests took a strange twist yes­ter­day when Moru­ga/Table­land MP Michelle Ben­jamin was caught by po­lice of­fi­cers mo­bil­is­ing res­i­dents of Hin­dus­tan to stage fiery protests in the com­mu­ni­ty.

That the po­lice of­fi­cers on­ly broke up the ac­tiv­i­ty and took no oth­er form of ac­tion is some­thing we hope will be rec­ti­fied soon. This is be­cause MP Ben­jamin has sig­nalled she is ready to take such ac­tion again if nec­es­sary in sol­i­dar­i­ty with her con­stituents. How­ev­er, this me­dia house ques­tions the man­ner in which the MP is bat­tling for the cause.

To be clear, it is every cit­i­zens’ right to protest. This is en­shrined in sec­tion 4 of T&T’s Con­sti­tu­tion. Claus­es “I,” “J” and “D” itemise the right to free­dom of ex­pres­sion, as­sem­bly and equal treat­ment from state in­sti­tu­tions. In the­o­ry then, cit­i­zens are em­pow­ered to protest against poor ser­vice from the Works and Trans­port Min­istry and WASA, who are spot­light­ed in this case. How­ev­er, clause “B” of that very sec­tion says cit­i­zens al­so have “equal­i­ty be­fore the law and the pro­tec­tion of the law.” This is to say that in what­ev­er one does, it should be with­in the law of the land.

This is where the stance be­ing tak­en by the cit­i­zens of south Trinidad should not be tol­er­at­ed. While they are en­ti­tled to protest for the pro­vi­sion of ba­sic ser­vices from state en­ti­ties, the block­ing of road­ways and burn­ing of de­bris to make their point, which in turn in­con­ve­nienced oth­er cit­i­zens and dam­aged state prop­er­ty, is il­le­gal.

Once again, how­ev­er, the politi­cians are seek­ing to cloud the is­sues with gim­mick­ry. So on one hand, we have the sce­nario where Princes Town MP Bar­ry Padarath ac­cus­es the Gov­ern­ment of ge­o­graph­i­cal dis­crim­i­na­tion, sug­gest­ing that state agen­cies are de­lib­er­ate­ly not pro­vid­ing con­stituents in UNC-led ar­eas with the ser­vices they re­quire. Ap­par­ent­ly, MP has not seen sim­i­lar com­plaints all over the coun­try for the same ser­vices so far this year and in pre­vi­ous years un­der var­i­ous ad­min­is­tra­tions. At the same time, we have MP Ben­jamin yes­ter­day phys­i­cal­ly comm an­deer­ing Hin­dus­tan res­i­dents to con­duct an ac­tiv­i­ty she knows to be il­le­gal, all un­der the guise that she is in sol­i­dar­i­ty with them.

So while this news­pa­per ful­ly sup­ports the right of south­ern cit­i­zens to protest for bet­ter ser­vice, as en­shrined in the Con­sti­tu­tion, we se­ri­ous­ly ques­tion the man­ner in which they are cur­rent­ly go­ing about it and hope they will re­con­sid­er their ac­tion in fu­ture. We sus­pect they will con­tin­ue such protests un­til they get some form of re­lief but it must be done with­in the law.