The Dead Horse Theory... (How NOT to Govern Sensibly)

There's something called 'The Dead Horse Theory,' it's the tribal wisdom of the Plains Indians that has been passed on from generation to generation and it instructs that, "When you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount." Sounds simple enough.

The present government of the Republic of Trinidad & Tobago seems to have opted for a sort of 'opposite' approach to that logic however, and since May 2010 other strategies 'other than' dismounting have been employed, strategies such as:

1. Buying a stronger whip – If less is more then surely more must be more than more, right? So if it's good to have Ministers in the Cabinet, why not have the largest Cabinet per capita in the world? With thirty two Ministries we are second only to India's thirty nine, but if we had a similar sized population as our Asian counterpart's estimated one billion people, we would have required a Cabinet of one hundred and fifty seven thousand Ministers. Can anyone say roll call?

2. Changing riders – Hire Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj as Attorney General. Or, if Ramesh is unavailable, settle for an AG who wants desperately to be Ramesh when he grows up.

3. Appoint a committee to study the horse – This is where Prakash Ramadhar seems to come in. How does he not yet get that the leadership keeps sending him out on big 'missions' to keep him occupied and quiet is beyond me, but I'm sure his family played the 'quiet' game and hide and go seek with him a lot as a child.

4. Arranging to visit other countries to see how other cultures ride dead horses – This is the Kamla model. When in doubt, travel.

5. Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included – How we came to have people like Anil Roberts and Jack Warner in the Parliament in the first place. To say that their behavior challenges decency is to understate it, but we would hate to behave like, uh, them, in our estimation.

6. Reclassifying the dead horse as living-impaired – Create a Ministry of Arts & Multiculturalism to institutionalize racism while preaching national unity and wonder why we all can't 'just get along.'

7. Hiring contractors to ride the dead horse – And if it makes no difference if these contractors are real or made up out of thin air, then Emanuel George may just be the man for the job. Capable of holding three way conversation with two imaginary people at the same time, Emanuel has made up fictitious Companies that appeared so real last time the UNC was in Office we still have them short listed for tenders and consultancy.

8. Paying consultants to tell you the horse is dead - Or your girlfriend to teach them manners. Or basketball. Or ballet. No one does this better than the UNC's Ernie Ross it appears, and he never seems to run out of those hair brained schemes that 'just might work.'

9. Harnessing several dead horses together to increase speed – Chandresh Sharma, Roodal Moonilal and Stephen Cadiz. Nothing else needs to be said.

10. Providing additional funding and/or training to increase the dead horse's performance – Glenn Ramadharsingh. So far the rough estimate is that he, through his Ministry of Silly Walks, has spent roughly thirteen million dollars per homeless person in the country trying to solve the problem of homelessness without actually spending any of that money on anything that might actually give the homeless a home.

11. Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse's performance - This is why Makandal Daaga, Clifton De Coteau and Rupert Griffith have jobs, why they can get a public salary for doing exactly what, nobody knows, and why no one seems to question it.

12. Declaring that as the dead horse does not have to be fed, it is less costly, carries lower overhead and therefore contributes substantially more to the bottom line of the economy than do some other horses - This is the exact 'gobble-dee-gook' non-speak that got Winston Dookeran promoted up the financial ladder until he ended up as the Minister of Finance, where it turned out that he had not a clue as to what he was saying all along.

13. Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses – Doesn't Bhoe Tewarie do this sort of thing well? I mean, right now he's running a program called 'Spatial Development' and no one seems to know what exactly that is about but no one wants to ask in case it's real.

And finally.....

14. Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position – This is what was done with the 'retired' Minister of Health Therese Baptiste Cornelis, who went on to make us the laughing stock of the entire United Nations, which took some doing in an Organization that has Iran, Zimbabwe and North Korea as members.

No, the Dead Horse Theory makes far too much sense to be entertained by this lot, and even though the performance that they give us is poor, one must never overlook the sheer entertainment value they bring. We plan to explore other policies that govern their governance in the near future, policies such as the Wet Water Conundrum and The PR vs Deliverables Juxtaposition. Stay tuned...