creole@wow.net

Pushing envelope of public tolerance

The crisis in customer service starts at the top of an administration which, for six weeks after assuming office, demonstrated its readiness only to stall the executive and legislative machinery of government to suit its own convenience.

Such is the sour insight that occurred last week to one who joined the line-ups at a “customer service” counter of a highly successful retailer.

People, it appeared, had responded to the heavy advertising, including offers of freeness. Weeks later, from the stories some told, purchases had neither been delivered nor were they available to be picked up. Nor could anyone at the counter explain why.

In the free market of Christmas, however, customers terminally disappointed were getting their money back, and exercising choices to shop elsewhere.

Parallels ended there.

Sour reflections prompting sour conclusions about the new-old Manning administration’s failure to get started offered themselves at a likely moment.

It was when the public, which had electorally bought the ruling party’s bill of goods, could still be pictured as waiting, uninformed, for delivery of product.

Nobody knew when Parliament would open, nor the full complement of its members, nor the content of its business, nor the identities of its floor managers.

One month after the showpiece swearings-in, the full content of ministerial portfolios had still not been determined such as would permit authoritative publication in the Trinidad and Tobago Gazette.

Free of risk that money-back guarantees might be invoked, the Manning administration was taking its own untroubled time.

“Customers,” meanwhile, could wait not just for the start of active representative government, but to know even the exact dispositions of executive responsibility.

Last Sunday, Hamid Ghany, the political scientist, cited comparable T&T precedents for post-election Parliamentary openings. Colm Imbert, named leader of the government’s legislative business, cited a Canadian federal precedent.

From both came suggestions that, here and now in the Manning administration’s start-up delays, nothing was out of order.

And that “customers,” or those speaking on their behalf, should not express unreasonable impatience.

The precedents were eloquently irrelevant to proper public expectation, or enlightened consumer sentiment.

So far from setting new standards for preparedness and performance, the new executive and legislature were displaying the usual down-home indifference, and coolly shrugging off any obligation to do better.

On Wednesday, among reports surfacing on the shape of things to come were the President’s choices of Independent Senators.

If he had made his selections before, His Excellency didn’t want to be so forward in announcing them as to show up the relative latecoming of the government’s and opposition’s final nominees.

Little, also, to look forward to in President Richards’ ceremonial cameo tomorrow. No Throne Speech, his office said, in a reminder that the seat of sovereign authority is located elsewhere than in the head of state’s official place.

The President, his office said, “will be sharing his own thoughts on matters he deems appropriate.”

It was an effort to impart spin on a Presidential delivery of predictable value hardly more than ho-hum.

Even so, when not in the mood, Mr Manning has earlier cancelled that occasional Presidential claim of 15 minutes or less of Red House fame.

Embers of hope were equally doused for any statement, out of Presidential or Prime Ministerial mouths, of a legislative programme.

It’s seldom possible to identify public clamour for better planning that would, say, show in the Manning administration’s hitting the ground on its feet rather than, as is now happening, on its backside.

Pan leaders grumble for more “decisive” moves toward Panorama 2008 short weeks away.

The National Carnival Commission had dreamed aloud about somehow improving on Joan Yuille Williams’ Port of Spain mas model of “movin’ to de riddum of de road.”

Reality reigns with the understanding that the new Culture Minister, already looking and sounding out of breath, is incapable of tweaking or twisting any part of the received 2007 template.

URP people waiting weeks as usual for their pay, don’t hold anybody answerable for the PNM election slogan to “deliver because we care.”

As November 5 confirmed, penalties for which the government’s non-performance may be liable are seldom imposed in elections.

“How we vote is not how we party,” David Rudder once sang. The line reaffirms that “how we vote” is not any reliable testament of how “we” feel about how the government is working.

Wearing red PNM T-shirts, people protest PNM government failures. Literally translating a rhetorical pretence, Radhica Sookraj on November 27 reported on some deep-south protesters: “They want to retract their votes for the ruling PNM.”

It’s among people who voted differently that are now circulating e-mail newsletters with bitterly jeering content like “Yuh want PNM, take PNM!”

The elections over, focus tightened on the year’s murder count, as if that were the conclusive benchmark of numberless things going disastrously wrong.

By last week, only the Congress of the People were tramping in the rain outside Whitehall, calling for replacement of National Security Minister Martin Joseph.

When a Volvo bus with passengers split in two on the Solomon Hochoy Highway, the manufacturer called the event “unprecedented...worldwide,” and promised to send investigating engineers to allay fears of its T&T customers. We who live here easily guess that if that big bus would jackknife anywhere, it would be in T&T.

But Volvo will probably have learnt much about the low the expectations of its T&T motoring and commuting customers.

The Port of Spain City Council just then demonstrated how far the PNM state can go in abusing power and pushing the envelope of public tolerance.

To hold a Christmas blockorama party, the Council cordoned off part of Knox Street.

I had luckily avoided that part of town. But I read that the PNM Knox Street jam session created an “incredible traffic jam.”

On behalf of “customers,” at least Newsday noticed, and editorially denounced that example of how “the politicians...at the central or local government level show little consideration for the comfort of the general public.”