The nation the PNM made

PAOLO KERNAHAN

I'VE BEEN thinking lately about TT's crushing societal malaise – crime, general lawlessness, economic paralysis, low productivity, social inequality and rampant divisiveness.

Recently, I was nearly forced into a highway guardrail in a deliberate act of rage by a man seemingly angered that I wasn't driving fast enough.

This incident got me chewing on what made us who we are – 24/7 boiling rage, a nation that's stuck, unable to prevail as a unified people and numb to record-breaking murders.

Then it struck me: our national watchwords, discipline, production and tolerance – we're the polar opposite of that ethos. We're mostly indisciplined, as evidenced at the lower end by bad parking, littering, absenteeism, etc, and at the upper end by widespread corruption and malfeasance and incompetence in public office.

In both the public and private sectors, productivity scarcely produces a pulse. Trinis will find any excuse either not to go to work or not to do much of it when on the job. Consequently, everything takes longer than it should and almost nothing works.

And tolerance? While we may have more religious grace than most other countries, we make up for that with deep-seated racial mistrust and naked racial aggression.

So how did we stray so far from the founding principles of this nation? Well, that requires an honest assessment of the long shadow of Eric Williams, a man more lionised than analysed.

Speaking critically of the legacy of Williams, the so-called "father" of the nation, is heresy. The average Trini is loath to interrogate the true impacts of Williams's politics.

Discipline. Production. Tolerance. The watchwords and ethos espoused by a man whose vision for an independent, prosperous, multicultural, multi-ethnic society never translated into policies that might manifest these aspirations. No surprise there, as politics always trumps policy. Power must precede purpose.

The scholarly Williams envisioned a Caribbean force liberated from the yoke of colonialism. It would be powered by educated people with horizons limited only by intellect, character and determination.

"The future of the nation is in our children's school bags," said the Oxford alumnus. What is the reality today, though?

It's estimated that as much as 30 per cent of secondary school students, most of them boys, drop out of the system. Beyond the dropouts are those who don't graduate but just leave, having learned little to prepare them for life.

The PNM boasts of its "free" education, but no one wants to audit the performance of the system. Broadly speaking, conscientious and skilled teachers are frustrated by a lack of resources and abysmal administration.

These and other factors are responsible for the vast numbers of unprepared, maladjusted young adults just hanging around the place.

Academic credentials (or lack thereof) aside, this country is inundated with people who wear ignorance like a crown and wield their sense of entitlement like a burnished sceptre. In our public services and across our private sector, nowhere escapes the necrotising touch of crappy, doh-care attitudes. "I gettin' pay eedah way!"

In 1961 in Woodford Square, Williams uttered the famous words "Massa day done." Except we swapped distant masters for those who looked more like us. Citizens unwittingly surrendered our agency to a species of politics designed to keep the larger society onside and dependent.

How much damage was done to the national work ethic through social make-work programmes? DEWD, LIDP, URP, CEPEP – all these shape-shifting creatures of the socialist creep retained one core characteristic – "liberation" of citizens through the enslavement of dependency. Vast swathes of society came to understand governance to mean "minding" the people, an understanding politicians have openly exploited.

The PNM has the dusty blueprints for what the country looks like today. It has ruled for longer than any other political party. State agencies and ministries are embedded with its operatives executing its myopic, jaundiced vision. It's been said before, but it bears repeating: this is PNM country.

Eric Williams was without question a stellar academic and shrewd politician.

The difficulty is, as a nation born into independence, we needed more than that. We needed people with the will to craft policies that would actually enable every citizen to live up their full potential. In my opinion, we didn't have it then and we certainly don't have it now.

Until we ask the hard questions about why this country is the exact opposite of the TT envisaged by Williams, we'll never solve our most complex societal problems.