DON'T CRY FOR ME, VENEZUELA

I had the pleasure last night of dining with an 80 year old lady who had just arrived from Caracas to visit her daughter who is married to a Trinidadian and lives here. Naturally, the conversation turned to what was happening in her unfortunate country and, more importantly, how was she surviving? I also wanted to know how the poor people were managing.


Here is some of what she told me:
- the black market exchange rate today is 400 bolivars to US$1. Nobody pays attention to the official exchange rate ... not even the banks. In any case, unless you have very high government connections it is impossible to buy US dollars at the official exchange rate; everything is priced at the reigning black market rate which climbs higher every day;
- everybody has lost weight ... except those in Government. This is because food is scarce. She herself has lost 5 kilos over the last 12 months;
- scarcities in everything are common. Meat is like gold and just as scarce and just as expensive;
- because of the scarcities people are hoarding. If you see an item in the grocery today you buy it, even if you don't need it, because it won't be there tomorrow;
- items like soap and shampoo are either not available or are of extremely poor quality. No luxury brands (e.g., Pantene) are available;
- the minimum wage is 1,800 b's a month. Put another way, the minimum wage is the equivalent of US$4.50 a month. No wonder that people are starving and crime is so high;
- public transport has collapsed and private taxis (like our PH taxis) charge whatever they like. My old lady friend has an ironer who comes in once a week for about 2 hours every time. The ironer charges her 100 b's for her time plus 55 b's for her taxi fare. When the ironer leaves she walks to another job;
- Caracas is now filthy dirty. The roads are full of potholes. The malls are empty and many businesses are closing or have closed.
- inflation is running at close to one million percent a year! Prices of goods in the shops change literally every day!


And you wonder why somewhere close to 10 percent of Venezuela's population has fled the country! Me? I blame President Maburro (and yes, the misspelling is deliberate), his sidekick Vice President Diodadas Cabello, who is the head of the infamous Cartel de los Soles, and who is probably the most dangerous Drug Lord in the Hemisphere, and the Cubans who have created a security apparatus that makes a coup most unlikely.  But it doesn't matter, does it? Maburro gets fatter, Cabello and his cronies get richer, the Cubans get their oil and the poor starve. Then neighbouring countries Like Trinidad & Tobago faced with an influx of refugees fleeing the tyranny, show no sympathy or empathy for these suffering people but instead complain that they are coming over here by the thousands. Of course, there is NO criticism of the tyrannical regime that has forced them to flee. Neither is there any consideration of how desperate  man or woman has to be to flee from his/her home and go to a strange land where they have no family, no friends and don't even speak the language! And the TT government sits down with these monsters, breaks bread with them and makes deals which are kept secret from the rest of us!


And nobody sees anything wrong with this!!
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LIES, HALF TRUTHS AND MORE LIES

It is getting very difficult ... if not impossible ... to believe anything that the present Government says ... which is very sad indeed. Trust is the number one requisite for any Government to hold and when that is gone then there is chaos.


There are (unfortunately) too many examples of Government Ministers lying outright or shading the truth in such a way as for their statements on the particular issue that they are talking about to be so wildly misleading that to call them anything other than lies would itself be a lie. Take, for example, the statement by the present Minister of Planning Camille Robinson Regis. She is reported to have said that it was the UNC who built the HDC development at Greenvale. Now, that is simply not true. The truth is that the Greenvale development was approved by the then PNM Government in which Dr. Rowley held the position of Housing Minister. And guess who was the Planning Minister? That's right! None other than the great lady herself: Camille Robinson Regis. And guess what? At the time that the HDC was given the go ahead to build Greenvale there were adverse reports that the area could flood and the appropriate planning and Town & Country approvals were NOT granted.


But Mrs. Robinson Regis was right about one thing: AFTER the development was complete at a cost of around $300 million the UNC Government handed out the houses.  So? Who is to blame? The people who spent the $300 million in the first place or the ones who after the money was spent handed out the houses? Both? Yeah! I guess you could say so, but frankly, I put more blame on Mrs. Robinson Regis and her cohorts than I do on the UNC in this instance.


There are too many other examples of lies and half truths to list them all here. But let's take a look at another one: Petrotrin. We heard in  or about the middle of this year that a  decision was taken then to close down Petrotrin with all the resulting consequences that flowed from that decision. Okay. So far so good. I'm not here debating whether or not the decision to close Petrotrin was correct or not.


So? What happens next? We have recently been told that a foreigner, one Mike Wylie, has been hired to run one of the successor companies  (I think that it is Heritage Petroleum) as its CEO. Again, so far so good. (And again, I am not debating here Mr. Wylie's salary or anything else as to whether or not he is being overpaid.)  But yesterday in Parliament, Minister of Amongst Other Things Communication, Stuart Young is reported to have said that Mr. Wylie was hired in August of this year ... to which piece of information I thought 'hold it sheriff, she's heading for the strawberry patch!' Why? Because something here is dreadfully wrong with the timing.


You see for such a high level hiring to take place it would need to have been advertised. But we know that it was never advertised locally. Because if it had been then we would all have started asking awkward questions as to what in the name of heaven was going on? Why was this job being advertised? And the answers would have been ... how shall we say? ... embarrassing to the Government as they would have been forced to admit their plans. They didn't want either the Union or the country to know what was going on.


Of course, one could ask why wasn't a search done for a national, but you would only end up with the same answer. (I can't help but remember Dr. Rowley's plea some time ago to nationals in London to come back and serve their country ... but that's another story, again.)


What is most significant here is the TIMELINE. The search for a new CEO had to have started at least five to six months BEFORE the hiring of Mr. Wylie (which you will remember was in August). This would allow 30 days for applications to have been submitted, another 30 days to vet  and short list the applications  and another 30 days for interviews before arriving at the final short list which we now know to have been three people ... a Japanese, an Iranian and Mr. Wylie. And then there would be the final interviews and then the negotiations with the preferred candidate. As I said, you're talking of at least 5 to 6 months BEFORE August 2018. Which means that at least by the end of February/early March of this year they knew that they were planning to shut down Petrotrin.


But a decision like this is not taken in the dark. There would have had to have been discussions and decisions  AFTER the decision to close  was made to plan on how to go about the closure, what they were going to do, plan the successor companies, plan their management requirements, determine the various skill sets required and so on. In other words, it is not unreasonable to presume that the decision to close Petrotrin was made about a year before it was announced. Anyone who has ever advertised for a senior executive post knows what I'm talking about. And when we are talking about Government?! Well, they take an even longer time ... unless, of course there is/was a cabal inside the Government who took it upon themselves to do all that was necessary to fast track this matter and just get it rubber stamped when everything had been decided and done. If that is the case, then this points to a secret government working for their own purposes and not necessarily for the good of the country. There are reasons why safeguards exist and flouting them (or appearing to flout them) creates very ugly and most unnecessary suspicions that are better left unexpressed at this time.


Now, there is an argument that commercial decisions need to be kept secret for as long as possible. The problem here is that Petrotrin is/was not a private company owned by private individuals, but a public company owned by the State, or, to put it another way, owned by the citizenry of Trinidad & Tobago. Different "strokes" apply to such a situation and you cannot apply normal commercial considerations to a State owned enterprise.


 Which brings us back to the original point of this post: we are being lied to with lies, half truths and more lies. And, for the record, a half truth is a statement that contains some element(s) of truth but which leaves the listener/reader with a very different impression from what has really happened and leaves out crucial and important details. There is a reason why when a witness is sworn in in the Courts he is asked to tell the WHOLE truth. And that is exactly what we are not getting!


What do you think?






B

WHITHER GOETH THE COUNTRY?

Just about everybody in the country is crying these days about the dire straits in which Trinidad  Tobago finds itself. Depending on whom you talk to the fault lies with the "other side", meaning the side to which that person does not belong or identify with. The complainers wax warm when it comes to discussing the leadership shortcomings of the other side. But the truth is that personal leadership shortcomings are not the main problem ... although, admittedly they have contributed to the problem. There has been a fundamental shift in the politics of the country in which both of the major parties have become more homogenous and the mix of actual concerns has turned more and more to issues of identity ...or to put it bluntly: Race!


PNM voters are overwhelmingly Black, Christian and generally come from the poorer sections of the society.


UNC voters are overwhelmingly Hindu and Indian with a large section of the Moslem and Christian Indians supporting that Party.


Very generally speaking, the UNC supporters are financially better off than their PNM counterparts and tend to rely less on Government jobs and largesse. The children of UNC supporters generally tend to do better in school than those of the PNM.


UNC funding tends to come from wealthy Indians (mostly Hindus) while the PNM tends to get most of its money from the Syrian community and a few wealthy businessmen who happily play both sides in the not unreasonable expectation that they will benefit from lucrative Government contracts when either side wins the next election.


The mainstream media is dominated by the African elements in the society as well (as in the case of the Guardian) by the Syrians. Unsurprisingly, the mainstream media is overwhelmingly biased in favour of the PNM although they all pretend that they are not. (As I have said before, it is their constitutional right to be biased. It is dishonest for them to pretend that they are not when they are.)


Social media choices reflect and reinforce these identity lines. It is fairly easy to guess at the ethnicity of an anonymous writer/contributor on social media just from reading his/her comments on any particular issue.


The attitude on both sides of the political divide is not just that the other side is misguided, but that the other side is evil. In these circumstances, any form of compromise  becomes impossible and any chance of the country moving forward is as great as a snowball will have of surviving in Hell.


Both Parties are hurling themselves and the country off of a cliff and resist genuinely reaching out to the other side.  Probably, the biggest problem is the complete lack of trust that exists on both sides in the bona fides of the other side. Excuses and/or deflections are the order of the day ... on both sides! It's always "their" fault and "we" are always not guilty. "We" have never done any wrong and will never do any wrong! To which statement an unbiased and reasonable observer on the ferry to Tobago will raise his eyebrows in slight surprise and say "really"?