http://guardian.co.tt/columnist/2012-12-02/going-routeAs I sat and watched UNC’s Monday Night Forum being broadcast live from the Debe High School and saw government ministers addressing an audience that was 99 per cent Indo-Trinidadians, Jack Warner’s words came back to haunt me and I asked myself, where was the diversity? Where were the Africans, the mixed faces, the Chinese, the whites; where were the young people?
The PNM-led Section 34 march, which included representatives of the Highway Re-Route Movement and the Cunupia Residents Association, seemed like a rainbow gathering in comparison to that meeting. If the Point Fortin Highway is a PP Government project, approved by the PP Cabinet, why are the UNC government ministers alone in defending it? Where were the COP, TOP and NJAC?
The Government is spending upwards of $7.2 billion, approximately the size of this year’s national budget deficit, on this project, and at a meeting called to defend its position, all it could attract was a few hundred middle-age to old people, all predominantly of one race. But Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar, in an address that was remarkable for the insight it provided into PP Government policy, soon explained why.
The highway is not being built to create greater access to Point Fortin and the areas of the southern peninsula which, given the presence of its hydrocarbon resources, may have justified the expenditure.
The PM said the Point Fortin Highway project will raise property values in the Penal/Debe area, that is, for the benefit of the residents whom she was addressing. This explains why the residents of the affected communities are, remarkably, being paid twice, by giving them land as well as financial compensation for their discomfiture.
Persad-Bissessar said the highway was intended so that the people of Debe, which she described as its focal point, can have unprecedented development: “We will create a more level economic playing field for all of T&T. “We will not stop this highway. My government will not be held to ransom by a handful of people. We will continue to operate without fear or favour.”
And that’s why there can be no middle ground between the PM and Dr Wayne Kublalsingh. The Highway Re-Route Movement’s arguments are based on the assumption that the highway is intended to provide faster access to Point Fortin with the neighbouring communities also benefitting.
The PM does not care about access to Pt Fortin, in fact, not in any of her speeches has she ever dealt with the people of Point Fortin or the benefits it will bring to the southern borough. As she told the Debe High School audience on Monday night, “Debe is the focal point. Debe is the centre of this highway.”
The PM justified the highway route by pointing out, “The highest property values are in areas where there is access to infrastructure. The Debe to Mondesir leg of the highway will increase property values in the towns of Debe, Penal, Siparia and Fyzabad.” But this is precisely what makes the highway such a dubious project in terms of public policy.
While the PM has positioned the highway, which accompanies the siting of a UWI campus in Debe, as part of a policy to create a “more level economic playing field,” she and her government have yet to repudiate the statements attributed to its ambassador to Washington that Indo-Trinidadians are “the most well-to-do, culturally strong and progressive ethnic group in our uniquely plural country.”
This does not sound like a community which needs such a large $7.2 billion draw on the treasury to have the economic playing field levelled.
As the PM boasts of fostering rising property values in Debe, which she reminded the audience they can take to the bank to use as collateral, it should have dawned on her that the truly economically disadvantaged, like the people of southeast Port-of-Spain who were being told that all the Government could offer was $69 a day in URP-type employment, might have been a better beneficiary of a $7.2 billion plan to “level the playing field.”
Instead the only playing field widened is the $10 million plan for Hoop of Life.
While work is proceeding frenetically on the plan inherited from the PNM for the highway, a similar plan for the development of east Port-of-Spain has more or less been abandoned through benign neglect, as the Government moves to take jobs and the accompanying services outside the capital city.
It is one thing to have a policy of rural development, which the Government is ostensibly promoting, but quite another when that policy seems to target only the region around the PM’s constituency. She has even got state-owned First Citizens, while banks are rationalising the establishment of brick-and-mortar outlets, to open a branch in Penal.
La Brea and the areas around Point Fortin, other communities like Moruga and Toco, Todd’s Road, Caroni and Mamoral and far-flung areas which have historically suffered from rural neglect, could also do with some development.
While much attention has been placed on the insults of Warner and Dr Roodal Moonilal, it is the PM’s enunciation of the philosophy driving the Government’s policy I found most disturbing. The most surreal, moment, however, was when Persad-Bissessar, responding to a letter from the Opposition Leader, told the audience, “In our government there are no kings and commoners, no masters and slaves…I do not see myself above anyone.
My faith, my humble beginnings and life experiences, teach me humility; they also teach me fairness, responsibility and courageous leadership.”
This from a PM who is referred to by no less a person than the Attorney General as “My Queen” and whom the party now heralds at official functions by playing Taurus Riley’s She’s Royal.
Maxie Cuffie runs a media consultancy, Integrated Media Company Ltd, is an economics graduate of the UWI and holds an MPA from the Harvard Kennedy School as a Mason Fellow in Public Policy and Management.
