Is like no one wants to talk about the sad times plaguing TNT:
Dengue, dirt and death for all
Martin Daly
Sunday, January 4th 2009
This year, 2009, opens on an unstable international scene. Here at home, Trinidad and Tobago enters the New Year in a deplorable state. For the ordinary citizen, there is very little that is progressive to which to look forward. The probabilities are that violent death by gun or blade or motor vehicle will wipe out our citizens in continuing large numbers throughout the year.
With the onset of another rainy season in the second half of the year, equally large numbers will again become seriously ill with dengue fever. In some cases, the carrier mosquitoes literally bite hapless citizens to death. Few are satisfied that the creaking public health system can meet the challenge. In addition, during those rainy months many citizens will be flooded out of house and home.
Hardly anyone, regardless of their individual voting habit, will doubt the accuracy of these predictions. The historical trends are clear and unequivocal. What is different, even as we begin 2009, is that the stench of the drying mud and the marks of the receding flood two feet up living room and bedroom walls have spread their vicious tentacles, like their colleagues-murder, motor manslaughter and dengue fever-to a wider and wider public, now no longer able passively to see and hear but not feel. What is not different is the recalcitrant "not our fault"-"do not blame us" attitude of our politicians. When we look to our elected officials to help us or, at least, to feel sorry for us, they dismiss us with ridiculous excuses.
Flooding is no longer a Central problem. Floodwaters are beating us in the North, beating us in the South, beating us in the East and beating us in the West. On a rainy day, every creed and race may find an equally dirty place. Our Governments have as much legal and political control over the use of our land space as they do over their use of our money, but they have led the way in the indiscriminate use of it, failing at the same time to do any forward planning to meet the infrastructural needs of a growing population.
In a penetrating editorial in this newspaper a week ago, responding to the Minister of Works, the chief excuse maker, the failure was summarised this way: "We suggest that Mr Imbert should really look at the performance of government, all governments, with respect to the National Physical Development Plan approved by Parliament some 24 years ago.
All have systematically ignored the requirement of the Town and Country Planning Act to review that statutory plan every five years and to return to Parliament where appropriate for its approval of any changes proposed. The continuing ad hoc development planning and control, as well as the gross imbalance in attending to national infrastructural needs, is largely responsible for the inadequacy of the national drainage system."
In the midst of abundant rainfall, should we see on Christmas Eve (or at all) a picture of a very elderly woman bucket in hand making a futile search for water, reportedly living in Success Village, Laventille, where there has been no regular supply of pipe borne water for months? Why do we need desalination plants when there is rain water for all?
We do not have the slightest possibility of threatening the Manning Government with removal, bearing always in mind that the mere threat of removal is an effective antidote to the arrogance of political comfort. Opposition politicians are obsessed with who should lead, not how they will lead us on the basis of plans and policies designed to reverse the terminal decline of our country. In any event, may I repeat again the need for new blood and not the same old distrusted faces.
One could make a good series of cartoons out of the advertisement of the dengue squad outfitted with masks and spray cans four months after the outbreak of the killer fever. At least the Minister of Health, mosquito Narace behaves consistently with his leader, in that the death of citizens from dengue fever is damage collateral to the Minister's grammatical skills in expounding on the meaning of the word "outbreak". I wonder whether he knows that there was an outbreak of a shortage of platelets, blood clotting agents separated from blood collected at blood banks. The Minister's self-centred and confrontational press conferences would serve a better purpose if he urged everyone to become regular blood donors.
Despite the probabilities of dengue, dirt and death for all, we need hardly be troubled by these prospects because, as one newspaper proudly announced, the wining season has begun. This is the beginning of the flow of fete after fete, the Trini equivalent of "the opium of the people". Ironically, the pan movement will be begging for funding again, while the Government squanders $60M on motor vehicles to transport dignitaries for a few days in March.
