I remember having something to smile about everyday. Sulking clerks, rude officials, dishonest taxi drivers, creative contractors even. Nothing, no one in this country could never get my goat. But that was before I realised a show of levity and near perfect teeth was really just despair seeking an outlet. Trinidad and Tobago and the system under which we are governed can do that.
Before losing cool, suave, sangfroid, most of my god given teeth and that highly touted sense of humour there was a time I sincerely held what we had here was better than the folks over in those big countries - where everyone pays through the collective nose for the simplest of services – like medical attention, schooling and roads.
But early in 2014 and purely by happenstance (not to mention the firm insistence of Victor Hart and the Trinidad and Tobago Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative) I was asked to spend time in the company of UWI based economist, Dr. Roger Hosein. It was they/he who started my now rapid slide to disgruntlement with the system of government I choose to manage things.
Roger, to appropriate first name familiarity with the learned gentleman, convinced me that I, you and the government are equally guilty in mismanaging the wealth and the well-being of those who must inherit from us, this vale of tears. How the good economist asks, can we seriously believe there is something to smile about when the cost of living has arisen in just two decades, to where the price of a basket of food at the supermarket is almost what our parents paid for a milking cow?
How is it that despite the active perception that we are living in a petroleum producing country, poverty remains a reality for so much of its people? And how is it, he queries (rhetorically to be fair), that despite the government’s insistence on enabling the tools and access to free education, the general level of literacy looks to be dropping faster than the proverbial ton of bricks?
Something, Hosein insists, has got to be wrong and it’s not just bad humour or the death of good kaiso. As I understand what the the guy is saying, governance in this country stinks, just stinks.