Politicians have lost sense of responsibility

THE EDITOR: Continuing on the theme of the nature of politics, it boggles the mind how its practitioners appear to have so little moral sense whenever they are found wanting or culpable.

Take the recent case of 11 babies succumbing to an outbreak of bacterial infections at the Port of Spain General Hospital's neonatal intensive care unit. Yet the chief honcho, under whose remit this hospital falls, refuses to do the honourable thing and resign.

Your honour is your sense of shame over wrongdoing for which you are, overall, responsible. The buck stops with you.

It has to do with character, recognising your culpability and feeling remorseful, which if even the deed cannot be undone, there is still some redemption for you in the eyes of the beholder.

Do the tears of those young mothers who lost the love of a lifetime, quite possibly due to negligence in a section under your remit, not touch your humanity, the very heart in you, to make you acknowledge your ultimate culpability and the need for recompense in some tangible way?

Or if not, are you not concerned about what the people will say, or what will your legacy be? How will you answer when you are called to the great beyond with your hands behind your back? Unless, of course, such values no longer matter and there is a new preoccupation with the self and self-interest that trumps every moral consideration as we know it.

Which is perhaps the thinking among high officials in the politics of this country. For how else can you explain in another instance, a person holding on to office even though a recent newspaper editorial – its abhorrence implicit in its tone – would have listed the number of homicides of late, spiking it with the decapitation of baby Amarah.

One would have thought that this blatant contradiction between holding on to office and dereliction of duty would have driven even the most insensitive person to do the honourable thing and resign, even with the continuing public endorsement of his boss.

But no! To resign out of a sense of shame or a sense of personal responsibility appears an alien or foreign concept to those elected to lead and elected to manage the country's affairs. Sustaining the self trumps and and every moral and ethical consideration.

And such thinking is not only rife in those in power.

The two instances illustrated above are mere symptoms of an all-pervasive attitude which I liken to a disease of the mind which pervades our politics – that of sustaining the self and sustaining power above all other considerations including self-respect, decency and taking responsibility.

In the current impasse on the other side of the political divide, the leadership and its co-conspirators seem prepared to give up their dignity and self-respect just to hold on to office. Even as they shamelessly engage in all manner of subterfuge in order to cheapen the efforts of those asking legitimate questions about expected practices as laid out in the constitution of their very organisation.

Your shame is your soul and when you have lost it, you have lost your common humanity. Is there a new shamelessness in the current politics? And if so, where or who can we, as ordinary citizens, turn to?

I leave the answers up to you.

DR ERROL BENJAMIN

Port of Spain