Defying logic and doing the right thing

A man walks through sargassum seaweed washed ashore in Rockly Bay, Lambeau Tobago with two buckets of water. Every year Tobago’s beaches are covered in sargassum. In other islands, companies have been processing and commercialising it. - Leeandro Noray
A man walks through sargassum seaweed washed ashore in Rockly Bay, Lambeau Tobago with two buckets of water. Every year Tobago’s beaches are covered in sargassum. In other islands, companies have been processing and commercialising it. - Leeandro Noray

“The older you get, the wiser you become,” my grandmother explained when, at four, I asked her how she knew so much. She knew almost everything: where the moon went to during the day, how Santa Claus managed to go all around the world in one night, where God lived, how to make peanut butter cookies. All of the important things. And she would reassure me, when I couldn’t get answers that, “When you are grown up you will understand.”

She was wrong. I am grown up now. I am even a grandmother myself. And there are a lot of things I do not understand.

Why the grocery stores in Tobago have empty shelves at the same time that the Supermarkets Association claims that there is plenty of food available and the Cabo Star, which was leased to transport goods and people from Trinidad to Tobago, stopped working on Saturdays and Sundays.

I still have my old copy of AJ Ayres' book Language, Truth and Logic, and I do try, honestly I do, but the logic of things eludes me.

Why, for example, does the Minister of Social Development say she does not have to give guidelines to religious organisations to whom she is giving $30 million to allocate to the poor?

Apparently she just knows that they will – all 43 of them – do the right thing. And not just the famous pastor whose hobby it was to collect tithes and collected nearly as much she is giving out all by himself and kept it in his bedroom, never giving a penny out to anyone, much less the poor in his parish. Is he the only one? (It is a lucrative business, I am told.) They collect that money from the poor for goodness’ sake.

The goodly lady wants bills, invoices and receipts as proof of where the money was spent. Has she not got any idea how easily Mr Google can produce those for you? Mr Google and a rubber stamp and your own definition of “the right thing” and you are home free. No need to set rules?

And I do not understand why there are the sane and sober prognostications about our doomed economic future due to the gas and oil wars going on between Saudi Arabia and China, cheered on by the USA and Russia respectively.

Fifteen years ago when the entire economic world became aware that reserves would decline, automobiles would go electric and renewable energy was the future, why was TT not investing in solar and wind energy as every finest mind advocated?

It takes at least five years from plan to implementation. When the Economic Development Advisory Board made solid and reasoned recommendations to get the country back on its faltering feet, within three years it was disbanded.

If we had started then, the recently produced technical and industrial advances in solar and wind energy that we have in abundance and electricity that we were producing at one of the lowest costs anywhere would mean that declining oil and gas reserves here and gluts elsewhere would not seriously endanger our economy. We KNEW that. Why were our politicians persuaded not to act on that knowledge?

Even though I am as old now as my grandmother was then, I still do not understand.

Not that we didn’t act on what the experts advocated. Our governments don’t usually act on the wisdom of our finest minds, which is why Singapore is where it is today and Trinidad is where we are when we started out 40 years ago on a level playing field,

What I do not understand is WHY.

And then there is Tobago.

I hate sargassum. It stinks. Tobago every year has abundant supplies. Because of its provenance coming from the sea, it is full of iodine and other minerals. A company up the islands is processing and commercialising it.

Tobago has no industry to sustain its population other than working (well, sort of working) for the Tobago House of Assembly (THA). It used to have tourism (well, sort of). Although it is, to my mind the most beautiful of all Caribbean Islands, whereas Barbados, St Maarten, the Caymans, even Anguilla can’t hold a candle to its character and beauty but generate enormous tourism-derived income, for some reason our successive governments opted to keep Tobago undeveloped.

For 13years the private sector in Tobago has begged for a reworking of the Foreign Licensing Act restrictions to enable the tourism sector in Tobago to rival tourism in the other islands – even to outdo them.

No one in the THA or the Tobago Hotel Association or the Tobago Chamber of Commerce or any of the other Tobago people can say why it has not been repealed to allow people in Tobago to have at least a chance at employment.

And now, with the pandemic lockdown even the remnants of what was there have disappeared leaving nothing but THA employment, which Tobago taxes cannot themselves pay for.

I would wager that when the Reconstruction Committee or whatever it is called reports on Friday to the Prime Minister, they will have left the Foreign Licensing Act in place and Tobago on its knees.

I don’t want Tobago to change either. It is so beautiful.

But the lockdown has taught us that things must change if we are to survive. Is it that the Prime Minister, himself from Tobago, likes it that way?

I really, really just do not understand.

My grandmother was wrong. Age does not bring wisdom.

Comments

"Defying logic and doing the right thing"

More in this section