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Teach
squatters to be responsible
the powers that be should put a stop immediately to all those
unsightly shacks that continue to pop up all over the country.
Many would say these are poor people, but are they all really?
Let me share some facts with you.
A man has a government job working for $2,500 a month before
tax, yet he is able to take care of his wife and four children.
He also saves a little until he can afford to buy a piece
of land and then build a little house.
Another fact: a little lower down the street, five working
members of a family live in a shack. One was making over $2,700
a month from a cargo company. They did not have to pay for
water, power, house tax, etc. After a time they decided to
squat on government land. One had a house in Arima.
After some years they were all given houses by the Government,
including the one who already had a house. Why should someone
who is squatting walk around wearing Nike shoes, Hillfiger
jacket, Adidas cap and cell phone? They want to drive around
in cars but do not have a place to live. Where are their priorities?
Many of these squatters are lazy. Offer them a job and they
would never show up, but they want to blame others for their
problems. They need to be taught how to save money for buying
a house, their children’s education, medical insurance,
etc, and the responsibility of home ownership.
The tax-paying citizens cannot continue to maintain and carry
those who would not help themselves.
Ken Babwah
ken_babwah@msn.com
Kudos to Family Court Committee
The T&T Coalition for the Rights of the Child would like
to commend the judiciary and members of the Family Court Committee
chaired by Stephanie Daly for a great job in finally bringing
the court to fruition.
Having had the opportunity to attend the opening ceremony,
tour the facility and meet some of the workers, we at the
Coalition are pleased with the initial phase of this process.
We can only hope that the human resource that is needed to
successfully compliment this facility will be equally impressive.
The journey has just begun and we wish you all at the courthouse
many blessings and positive vibes.
Gregory Sloane-Seale
TTCRC
sloaneseale@yahoo.com
‘Guardian’
on ball with editorial
I congratulate your newspaper for being the only one of the
three dailies who thought that the crime situation in T&T
warranted a front page editorial (17/05/04).
Indeed, the time has come to air our views, both verbally
and in print, on the horrific bloodbath now being showered
on the people of this nation under Patrick’s nebulous
impotent Government.
Everard Leon
Port-of-Spain
Bulldozing not the solution
Tears ran down my face a few nights ago as I sat in the comfort
of my living room watching some family’s home on TV being
ruthlessly torn to pieces.
Then Keith Rowley, our Minister of Housing, offers as his
defence, “Poverty is no excuse for lawlessness.”
Technically, he has a point, but anyone with a social conscience
will also argue that “it is better to break the law than
to break the poor!”
But putting all political rhetoric aside for a while, let’s
be realistic. From what I have read, squatting is as natural
to man as taking water from the rivers for survival. I understand
that in Moses’ time, nomadic tribesmen would just follow
their grazing herds and pitch tent wherever night caught them.
So squatting, per se, was never a crime.
It is only when the society became agrarian that the definition
of “providing shelter for one’s family changed.
Since then, those who have “fallen through the cracks”
in the system and are unable to claim a piece of this blessed
earth, we call them squatters.
Ultimately, the onus falls on the rest of us, the privileged
land owners, to identify the genesis of this unacceptable
occupation on our titled properties (most of the time it’s
really our own undoing) and try to find ways and means to
contain the situation from exponentially escalating beyond
critical mass. (I am talking like a politician, but you get
the drift.)
And it is for this reason we the enfranchised have elected
Rowley, hoping that he would implement some kind of solution
(humanitarian, of course) to this endemic problem of shelter.
But, in light of the recent demolitions, maybe he needs to
revisit the Cedula of Population which allowed French colonisers
to settle in this land—the land of the Caribs and Arawaks—whilst
still under Spanish rule.
Or the Homestead Act of the USA. Or even take a page from
John Humphrey’s Sou Sou Land resettlement programme.
There are so many tried and tested land reform blueprints
to follow that I am sure the Minister in his wisdom will eventually
come up with something less brutal.
But at the moment it beats me, a simple layman, to comprehend
how big hard-back men (and women, too) can sit in Parliament
or Cabinet or wherever and at the end of the day their best
answer to the squatting problem is to send in a gang of men
armed with sledgehammers and a bulldozer.
Jerome Audain
Curepe
PTSC tenants in the dark
I am an employee with one of PTSC’s tenants. Over the
last four months PTSC has been sending its tenants notices
that the supply of electricity would be off for two days,
especially on weekends.
Whenever this happens I don’t earn any money. On many
occasions my employer would shut down operation, only to realise
the electricity never went.
My employer is losing money and so too other tenants and employees
working at City Gate.
A few days ago I discovered that seven tenants have lost equipment
worth $100,000 due to the recent electrical repairs at City
Gate, with no sign of compensation.
Please help us at City Gate.
Mathilde Gomez
Arouca
False sense of security
The poor whale thought it could find peace and solace in La
Trinity. As it came to shore in La Brea to breathe its last
breath, it must have been fooled into a false sense of security.
For while some genuine folks tried to save the creature, others
pretended to be caring. Instead of helping the whale, they
rode on its back and carved their names on its skin, inflicting
pain.
It sort of reminds me of our present government.
Vashit Rooplal
Curepe
astralflirt@netzoola.com
Current
attack on democracy not new
About
15-20 years ago, your newspaper columnist, David Renwick,
wrote words to the effect that certain social phenomena that
were seen in Jamaica needed only about 10 years before they
manifested themselves in Trinidad, and then to the rest of
the Caribbean. I think he identified crime as one such phenomenon.
David was right, but far more than he would have imagined.
Not many years after that disclosure, T&T witnessed the
debacle of the Muslimeen attempted coup d’etat.
If only because it happened (but also because the law, proving
itself, in the estimation of many, to be an ass, furthered
it by letting Bakr and his cronies off), T&T “took
in front before in front took them.” Not satisfied with
that, we now lead the English-speaking Caribbean, including
Jamaica, in kidnappings.
I couple these two matters (coups and kidnappings) together
because it is something some of our politicians appear to
forget at the present moment.
While I deplore young Ashmead Baksh’s kidnapping no more
or no less than I deplore any other kidnapping in the history
of the phenomenon in T&T, I think that there is a line
of reasoning which, for obvious reasons, is flawed.
Apart from the Leader of the Opposition’s scathing diatribe
against the Government, two politicians, up to the time of
my writing—both bearing the same last name, incidentally—have
made the unfortunate inferences:
That this kidnapping is an attack on democracy (presumably
since it is a politician’s family that is involved).
That the fact that cocaine and missiles have allegedly been
planted at one politician’s home, followed by this incident,
furthers the former assertion.
That it is only in recent times that democracy has been under
attack in this country.
The truth is that, given the etymology of the word democracy
(its origin being in the Greek “demos,” meaning
“people”), when a kidnapping happens to any one
of the people, be they high or low, politician or plebe, democracy
has been attacked, that is, the people have been attacked!
Even if it is attacks upon politicians, per se, which constitute
attacks on democracy, the two namesakes, incidentally of the
same political party, will have to go back to 1990 when, in
that eternal blot on the pride, intelligence and security
of T&T, our Parliament was kidnapped, violated and terrorised,
several parliamentarians were injured, our Prime Minister
shot, a government MP killed, and our President threatened.
In the same incident in which several of our “demos”
were killed, several business places were robbed, plundered
and gutted by fire and, eventually, a whole nation raped,
by creatures who still strut freely around this country.
No one, therefore, should attempt to pin this so-called “new”
attack on democracy on the present PNM Government, as though
it just started and as though they are solely responsible
for it.
What we need to do is to make, right now, a desperate, sensible,
bipartisan and multilateral attempt, harnessing the best that
the political parties, the University of the West Indies and
the private sector have to offer, to build a national think
tank/ commission that would utilise—again—the best
that all our security forces have to offer, to minimise or
stomp out this scourge-wave of kidnappings, murders and and
other major crimes plaguing T&T.
Can anybody seriously tell us that it cannot be done? Will
anybody say that we have much time to think about it?
Rev Michael Friday
Bloomfield, Connecticut, USA
manfriday1658@comcast.net
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