TT's leadership in crisis

THE EDITOR: A long time ago, a certain citizen of the country, one Mr Lloyd Best, warned against investing too heavily in the question: who we go put?

The recently deceased Michael Harris on another occasion also advised against a preoccupation with messianic politics.

The message from both these Tapia voices, crying in the wilderness, was that if we concentrate on understanding our problems correctly and seeding a culture of collective citizen responsibility, we'd have a rich assortment of high quality potential leaders from all walks of life to see about national issues.

In this way it really wouldn't matter who is the captain of our team since all team members could see for themselves what the state of play is, what needs to be done and what their part has to be for anything, including leadership, to work.

Best and Harris each reasoned that insufficient attention to understanding our problems correctly, and learning to solve them together, would reinforce a preoccupation with: "Who we go put?"

And still here we are now, bereft of any sign of any proper national political leadership anywhere on either side, at a time of multivariant national crises.

In private conversation most Trinidadians of any persuasion readily admit that there is no evidence of meaningful problem-solving capacity in either the PNM administration or its predecessor UNC, the current opposition.

What a time to find yourself here!

Now, appallingly and disastrously, there is a strong resemblance between the current constitutional mess we find ourselves in because of the Faris-Nelson question and the Section 34 moment of the People's Partnership term.

Though the Section 34 moment is materially different in many ways from the Faris-Nelson question, they resemble in one core feature – both permit big people to avoid facing consequences in a court of law for corruption and public mischief.

And now where are we? Three AGs (Ramlogan, Al-Rawi and Armour), a minister of justice (Volney) and a minister in the Ministry of the AG (Young) have all contributed to ongoing national disgrace.

Will any of them face any disciplinary procedure from their substantive professional body? Not even a buff self? And neither the current PM nor his predecessor is out of reach from the taint of this.

Because we have not adequately described what our real situation is, we keep selecting people from the legal fraternity who we assume, merely because of their legal qualification, adhere to some high principle of law in the name of the good of the country.

All of them have a striking defect in common: They are more committed to the status quo than to problem-solving.

Since we focus on who we go put, instead of what is the problem, we keep hoping to pull our medicine out of the rubbish dump.

NOVACK GEORGE

San Fernando