A Despicable Truth....

There is an old saying that insanity is doing the same thing day in and day out expecting different results. This month the nation mourned the loss of a tireless and outspoken activist in the war against corruption, and in a country where even the war itself is corrupted, where there are no real enforced state sanctions against illegal self enrichment and all that stands between the people and total capitulation to greed are a few tireless soldiers, such a loss is a great loss indeed. Rare are the men and women who give themselves so wholly to a confrontation so slanted against them it is  almost rude and arrogant in its perversion, and while many have expressed deep and heartfelt sympathies over the untimely and tragic loss of such a patriotic son of the soil, many of the corrupt in society exhaled a little deeper, loosen their belts a little more, knowing full well that the nation's loss would eventually translate to their gain.

Fifty years after independence the people find themselves living in a society where, to many, corruption and graft is seen as a career option and a pathway to success. The saying 'behind every great wealth lies a great crime' is truer here than anywhere else in the world, yet little if anything is done to bring these high ranking criminals to justice. Does crime pay in T&T? Rumors that cabinet ministers may allegedly have financial stakes in lands through which the latest make work project must pass or contracts for the project itself is met with a shrug of defeated acceptance rather than outrage and that should answer your question. How do you fix something that no one seems to think is broken? If CLICO or HCU for that matter had happened anywhere else in the civilized world, by now those companies' chief executives would be serving time in jail as would representatives of the accounting firms that facilitated the deceit that masked the theft, the state industry supervisors that looked the other way, and the governance that was either complicit or criminally incompetent to allow such a thing to occur; but this is Trinidad, a country where you build your legal fees into your crime at the planning stage.

By now also the issue of the airport seven, ten, fifteen, twenty two or how much ever else were charged in the Piarco Airport fiasco has become old news, and while the effort to hold those responsible in that exercise in wholesale thievery has failed spectacularly (or succeeded if you were one of the defendants), many of their overseas accomplices have been ruined, fined and even jailed for the parts that they played. Perhaps if anything can be considered a win here, government sponsored theft could be limited to homegrown bandits out of fear of international prosecution, leaving the ill gotten gains to trickle down through this economy rather than repatriate it to other jurisdictions. The problem that becomes most evident in looking for a solution and comparing Trinidad's politics to anything else in the world is, while many other countries have learned to tolerate some corruption as par for for the course in the delivery of governmental services, we in this country have learned to cross our fingers and hope for something worthwhile mixed in with our corruption.