Fear of dragons

The leaky rotunda isn’t the only glitchy thing in our new half-billion-dollar Red House.

I repeat myself when I say Parliament’s website is the most thoroughly maintained of any state entity I’m aware, and a model of what public-sector online portals should do.

But it, too, failed me this week.

The information technology systems that ordinarily make the Parliament’s work exceptionally accessible to its key stakeholders – us voters – are undergoing some hiccups.

While the Attorney General’s been busy touting to media that a new system for registration of convicted sex offenders became law last week, the Parliament website continued to list the law, passed last September, as still awaiting proclamation.

Parliament staff, who continue to be an uncommon exemplar of public service professionalism, only updated it after I called. President’s Office, where I’d also called to verify proclamation, disconnected me following a lengthy hold.

Contrary to what a number of media houses have reported, the new registry of sex offenders to be established and maintained by the Commissioner of Police is absolutely not available online for the public to macco their names, addresses, photographs and offences.

It’s a law-enforcement tool, not a measure to do what we love to believe is effective, whether on the hustings or in the name of justice – shaming. Convictions of sex offenders will remain matters of public record, and be covered by the media; but access by the public to elements of a convicted offender’s registry information, under the new legislation, requires the order of a court.

The media need to be much more vigilant about their fourth-estate role, especially when reporting what the Government crows in an election year. We also ought to be able to depend on the Office of the Attorney General for a more sober, non-political representation of the law; but that’s unlikely.

The other thing I turned to the Parliament website for were the new HIV and children’s policy green papers laid by the Office of the Prime Minister in the House last week. This newspaper’s welcome editorial asked what mechanisms the public had either to access or to comment on the HIV policy. I imagine few in the public know that every document so laid in the Parliament is available to the public for download from the Parliament website.

Except the download portal hasn’t worked for me since the Red House move. Of course, the helpful staff shared them. And, lo and behold, this is what I read:

“Pre exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), is antiretroviral treatment to prevent HIV infection in persons who are at high risk of transmission. 1) PrEP will be provided as part of a comprehensive combination prevention approach to reduce exposure to infection, and administered in accordance with guidelines issued by the MOH. It would be promoted among discordant couples as directed by the MOH. 2) The MOH is responsible for providing guidance to clinicians for administration of PrEP.”

So it seems our health minister’s hubris – declaring that Government making PrEP available to voters like me would be to encourage irresponsibility – may be in breach of his own Cabinet’s policy. Or perhaps his ministry’s guidelines will in time spell out his bias.

I couldn’t help but imagine how the powers of a reinstalled sea serpent overhead, joined with the memory of our original people’s bones that were buried below, could not only exorcise the gremlins in the Red House renovations, but bring a different sense of apprehension to the actors operating under the roof.

Perhaps a dragon straddling our affairs of state is precisely what this country needs to protect us from the elements we face. Prayerfulness hasn’t worked terribly well so far, after all. Though, from Akash Samaroo’s reports, the Prime Minister seems to, mirroring his predecessor, place a great deal of stock in it.

And by dragon, I don’t mean Double G. The only thing more frightening than a report this week carried (only in Newsday) of one of the Police Commissioner’s online rants, cut and pasted onto TTPS Communications Unit letterhead, was the public silence that greeted it. The TTPS release alleged that the seemingly dispensable late Cocorite resident Cecil Skeete (reported by a media house to have accused the commissioner of abuse) and a journalist who’s repeatedly held the commissioner to account were part of an elaborate conspiracy to bring him down. We’ve seen little leadership from bodies with authority to investigate complaints attributed to Skeete. We’ve seen a citizen involved in an abuse complaint against the CoP gunned down, with a collective shrug. We’ve seen internal affairs officers reportedly investigating the situation transferred, without public outcry.

Gabrielle Hosein wrote on Wednesday about raising her and other girl children to not be sheeplike followers, but to roar. It’s a lesson adults need badly. On the fiftieth anniversary of our 1970 revolution, will journalists also start to disappear, with no voices raised?