creole@wow.net

The ‘honeymoon that’ never happened

It hung in the air like like the pop song sentiment that it was. “It’s a love thing,” a PNM campaign line, reached out and touched whatever corner of the national heart the crooner Patrick Manning addressed.

To him, then, winning the election marked the satisfaction of loving and being loved in return. In pop language, he had been cut some slack: he could feel entitled to postpone his ministers’ effective assumption of office and the opening of Parliament.

By the Red House opening last week, Mr Manning was voicing sentiments of disappointed expectation. Love given was evidently not being returned.

He had expected a “honeymoon” from the media and the opposition. This was news to the media.

After the UNC, at the opening ceremony, showed itself disposed to ranting and raving, and breaking things in the House, he bravely affirmed he could do without any “honeymoon.”

If love was not being reciprocated, and peace not obtained, then he was prepared for war. And in a dark reminder of battle-readiness, he declared:

“We will defend whatever position we believe to be correct to the extent of our not inconsiderable ability.”

On an occasion marking the outcome of victory, the Prime Minister was being heard to acknowledge that hostilities are far from over.

The Red House, indeed, proved to be another setting for expressions of rebelliousness rolling out seamlessly before the elections and since.

As in Rio Claro-Mayaro and elsewhere, people appear provoked to fiery protest in irrepressible shows of feeling for the prime-time cameras.

If, in attitude and action in Parliament, Basdeo Panday and Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj offended against order and procedure and good-behaviour norms, they also gave effect to recognisable signs of the times.

The times are seeded with radicalising inputs and impressions, such that little about people’s responses should surprise us any more.

Port-of-Spain, putrefying in many parts under infestation by vagrants and garbage, attains rank as the ground zero of national frustrations. The capital city provides the inspiration and setting for predictably extreme responses.

At his occasional breakfasts with business people, Mr Manning has been unused to much talking-back.

In December, 2006, he asked for a show-of-hands answer to whether they were worse off than five years before. Not a single business palm rose.

Not everyone, however, who didn’t put up a hand was content to shut up. Gregory Aboud, president of the Downtown Owners and Managers Association, likened the inflation accompanying fast-paced, high-rising construction to indigestion from having “eaten too much too quickly.”

By the standards of outspokenness business people allow themselves, the Doma man ran the risk of standing out as an extremist.

It’s encouraging that, from later public statements, Mr Aboud doesn’t seem to care how it looks, or to fear retaliation.

Mr Manning promptly assured he was feeling all right, both about the construction and the inflation, and vowed staunchly to hit back at all critics.

Fear of backlash is not deterring people like Mr Aboud who insist on speaking their truths to power.

Nine days ago, he spoke a blunt heresy to the face of Local Government Minister Hazel Manning. The PNM’s sacrosanct developed-country status, Mr Aboud argued, was unattainable by 2020.

Port-of-Spain represents a picture of urban decay, he said, noticing the death of George Street, the dying of Henry and Charlotte Streets, and the “disaster area” of the Central Market.

With rare and radical disregard for consequences, this businessman, no user himself of the facility, publicly denounced City Gate as “almost a violation of people’s human rights.” In a free state, tough talk, softened by no undue water in the mouth, ought to be the preserve not just of activist or columnist types.

In such a state, members of what Lloyd Best called the “responsible classes” are called upon to lead opinion, using words unflinchingly characteristic of the abusive conditions they allow themselves to see.

People waiting painfully for buses and maxis, some of whom write hopeless letters to the press, may not themselves dare identify their City Gate experience as a violation of human rights.

Like others waiting, uninformed and ignored, for services throughout T&T, the notion of customers’ rights occurs to those who must use City Gate maybe only as an item of familiar and cynical rhetoric.

It’s on the basis of a knowledgeable and hard-headed assessment that people familiar with the operation of administration at all levels prudently avoid applying time-lines to improving change.

“The highest standard of living in the shortest possible time,” Mr Manning sloganeered last week. He vowed an unqualified “quantum leap in this ninth Parliament”—though it’s already starting late.

He could have been referring only to the speeding-up, by means unknown, of 2020-related legislative enactments. Not implementation, for which the Government machinery remains helplessly slow.

It’s the failed credibility over implementation that fell under the lights last week, as the Culture Minister and the National Carnival Commission delivered a show-and-tell about Carnival 2008.

Nearly two years since the last time in the Big Yard, design pictures have been released, and drastic but unexplained cost-cutting has been reported about the new Carnival centre. A contract for the building is still to be awarded.

Queen’s Park Savannah remains the scene of curious excavations and jerry-buildings.

Meanwhile, the theme of next year’s Carnival emphasises a return to “de road,” without Big Yard-type presentations, and Panorama finals again in San Fernando.

Pan Trinbago president Patrick Arnold was later reported to have been on a fast ferry to Tobago, while questions, not only about pan, remained unanswered at the launch.

Information was simply unavailable to clarifying the zig-zags of policy and pronouncement and the true intent behind the ad-agency tag lines about “doing it twice.”

Well, it’s no honeymoon for the new Culture Minister either. And the one reporter who got to ask the one question, Joan Rampersad, admirably stood her ground, and demanded answers as the NCC chairman squirmed under the spotlight and asked vaguely for the media’s “commitment.”