Apology without accountability

PEOPLE WERE so caught up with the PM's recent mea culpa they completely missed a breathtaking admission – the Government knowingly triggered the vaccine fiasco rollout. Dr Rowley told the country that despite foreknowledge of limited vaccines the Government proceeded anyway with its patently flawed vaccination plan.

Additionally, what the PM downplayed as miscommunication was actually a misrepresentation of the facts. The public was misled, causing dangerous crowding at health centres across the country. It's tempting to conclude that the principal considerations at work were purely political; a feeble attempt, perhaps, to seed hope in the population that the end of this nightmare is near.

Still, the PM's stunning acceptance of culpability seemed adequate for many people. This was, of course, a reasonable calculation – baffle the public with a hollow act of contrition thinly disguised as responsible leadership. It would suffice to cover the more damning root causes of a conspicuously engineered failure.

Frankly, Mr Shankly, it was a political masterstroke – eminently acceptable to the nodding flock. Sure, the ruse was transparent among the more intelligent in society. Still, as Trinis are a largely docile species with more bark than bite, the Government has moved on from the scandal without further perturbation.

To be honest, one week later I'm still marvelling at the simplicity of the PM's solution for the Government's prickly problem – the widespread uproar that followed the botched vaccination rollout. In all fairness, though, the tactic's effectiveness also relied heavily on the simplicity of the people. Dr Rowley delivered a political solution for a management and logistics problem.

He didn't just absolve the Minister of Health of responsibility in the fiasco – the PM pardoned everyone within the blast radius of that galactic, entirely avoidable debacle.

He shielded his administration from accounting to the public for its costly failure. This was a live demonstration of the PM's true talent, that of a shrewd political operator.

A jumped-up reporter pressed the PM to identify one person directly responsible for the fracas. Dr Rowley doubled down, saying, "I am to blame." Any opportunity to establish trust through accountability was thus squandered in favour of political manoeuvring – and it worked.

Dr Rowley understood that in saying "the buck stops here" (with me) it also means that's effectively the end of the discussion. There's no way to unseat a prime minister outside of an election so talk done. Well, not exactly.

During the news briefing, the PM mistakenly, albeit purposefully, suggested the vaccination blunder was limited to one day. The fallout was, in fact, felt on the Thursday and Friday. Perhaps because there wasn't the concomitant overcrowding on those days this was interpreted as a “win.”

On the Wednesday, as the vaccine roll-out spun out of control spectacularly, Health Minister Deyalsingh announced an alphabetical solution to the problem. This quick patch was questionable from the jump. As B follows A confusion ensued the next day. Far less publicised (if at all) was the fact that health centres were only allocated 50 doses per day. This led to many being turned away yet again. Worse still, health centres were dividing their time between regular activities such as NCD and child clinics – in a pandemic.

Deyalsingh said these decisions were arrived at in consultation with CEOs of regional health authorities. This revelation strongly suggests the machinations of a confederacy of dunces rather than the incompetence of just one man – total system failure.

Mistakes began long before that fateful Wednesday, starting with the failure of the vaccination registration system. The authorities had several months to get that mechanism working. Instead, they opted for a walk-in arrangement that made no sense for the number of available vaccines. The Health Ministry also waited until the vaccination roll-out had already begun to work on an online vaccine registration platform.

The idea that the Government's handling of the covid19 crisis has been commendable is risible and easily contestable. There is a quote commonly attributed to Albert Einstein: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them." I'm not convinced that the same flawed processes, systems and hive mind that gave us the failures of the past 15 months have been sufficiently changed to prevent recurrences. There certainly doesn't appear to be any preponderance of Einsteins in this administration's decision-making machinery.

Moreover, an apology without accountability almost ensures that if (when) mistakes are repeated in this high-stakes saga, we will be the only ones to pay for them.