PERCEPTION vs. REALITY

 

Something that I read somewhere once, has remained with me forever. It is that there is only ONE reason for politics - only ONE reason for Government, and that is to make life better for the people! Full stop! Punto finale! There is no other reason.

So, with this injunction in mind I have engaged myself in looking at all the major (and minor) national political parties in Trinidad & Tobago. I have left out Dr. Farley and his team from this exercise because they are not national in their aspirations, but are only concerned with Tobago.

  Looking at the ruling Party first, I have rather reluctantly come to the conclusion that it has failed the country miserably. Take the number one issue, for example, on everybody's mind right now: crime. My (very, very unofficial) survey tells me that we have reached a stage where everybody knows personally somebody who has been affected one way or another by this terrible scourge that is plaguing our beautiful country The next stage after that is when everybody has a family member who has been touched by this scourge in one way or another. Unfortunately, we don't seem to be very far away from that. It would be very nice to be wrong on this point, but I don't think that I am.

The PNM also has problems with its cadre of leaders. As a Prime Minister Dr. Rowley has failed to gather around him persons of demonstrable competence in their various Ministries. Take, for example, the disastrous performance of the current Minister of National Security. The lousy performance of the Minister of Health has been pushed out of the headlines by the crime situation, but the Health sector is still an absolute disaster. The clear message is: don't get sick in T&T! And so it goes on; the roads are a mess, the education system is failing and in a country which has plenty of rain there is a sizable proportion of the population that can't get a regular supply of water.

With Dr. Rowley and Co. failing so obviously then it would only be natural to assume that the opposition UNC would be an overwhelming favourite to win the next elections. But this is clearly not so. Even the most die hard supporters of the UNC are privately admitting that "things look tight". For better or worse, this is obviously a fault of the current leadership. Mrs. Persad Bissessar has failed in her bid to present herself as a credible alternative Prime Minister. Part of the reason why this is so is because she has failed to gather around her credible, strong and demonstrably competent people. Indeed, the perception is that anybody who MIGHT be able to present him/herself as a credible leader is unceremoniously booted out of the Party or "killed" politically. Unfortunately, in politics perception is reality, so it really doesn't matter whether this is true or not. What is true is that such a perception exists. And this perception reinforces the negative opinion that people have of Mrs. Persad Bissessar.

Then we have the two "hopefuls": Phillip Alexander and Gary Griffith. Again, unfortunately, neither of these two gentleman seem to have been able to garner support from strong and competent persons. To be fair, both of them have made some excellent points as to how they think the country should be run and how they would do it if given the chance. Their problem is that they are perceived (that word again) to be 'one man shows' and without any kind of party political infrastructure.

So we come back to the beginning of this post and the question that ought to be in the forefront of everyone's mind: are YOU better off today than you were 8 years ago when Dr. Rowley and his team came to power? If you are, then it is clear who you should vote for. But if you aren't better off then the question as to what you should do is still (rather surprisingly) up in the air.