A LAZY AND BORED LEADER?

HOW do you describe a national leader who plays golf up to four times a week while his nation is riddled with problems?

The United States media had several sharp depictions for Donald Trump, who spent many days on golf courses instead of handling his critical day job.

Trump is “disengaged from the daily business of governing, uninterested in policy details and strikingly, disturbingly incurious about the enormous apparatus he now commands,” Newsweek magazine summed up.

While campaigning for the presidency, Trump had said: “I am not going to have time to go play golf.”

Instead, he spent many days on the fairway.

Analysts said that in office, Trump was bored and had a poor work ethic, watching television for long hours instead of conferring with his top officials.

One journalist dubbed him “fundamentally lazy.”

Another reminded that Trump is employed by the American people; “we pay his salary.”

Does any of that remind you of a national leader much closer to you?

Prime Minister Dr. Keith Rowley clearly has a great love for the golf course, and, according to opposition politician Gary Griffith, plays the game up to four times a week.

Griffith said “it sickens me” that Rowley finds the time to swing his golf club when “people are being killed three and four a day, the whole country is at the threshold of anarchy.”

It is not the first caustic criticism the Prime Minister has faced for his golf-playing ways.

Professor Selwyn Cudjoe, in a newspaper column on July 30, 2022, asked whether previous national leaders Dr. Eric Williams, A.N.R. Robinson, Patrick Manning “or any public servant for that matter, would be seen playing golf on a workday.”

Cudjoe said that “it is difficult to countenance such a divergence on a workday” especially in light of the violence and social breakdown.

In opposition, Dr. Keith Rowley had criticised then-Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar as taking a “carefree” approach to her job, and as being “hotfoot” in her international travels.

Ms. Persad-Bissessar now returns the favour – and more – in describing Rowley as Trinidad and Tobago’s “laziest Prime Minister.”

As Rowley hopped over to Barbados last May for a weekend competition, Mr. Persad-Bissessar snapped: “Who dead, dead, who live, live, but Lazy Rowley must go and play golf.

“Our country is in tatters and in tears but this man is swinging a golf club in Barbados without a care about what is happening.”

With respect to travels, Rowley spent three weeks abroad last year, “without accounting to the public,” according to Cudjoe.

There is a common theme among critics – that T&T is under such a state of siege it requires hands-on leadership, a continuously engaged boss strategising, formulating and implementing policies and holding his officers to account.

Cudjoe terms the Prime Minister “the parent-in-chief.”

The professor said: “Many countries fail because of the lack of purposeful leadership.”

He called on Rowley to be “more responsible,” adding that leaders must be “respectful of (their) obligations…”

The PM’s regular golf engagements seem to say several things, including his passion for the game, his detachment from his crucial job, and his snooty persona.

None is that is likely to change in spite of growing public uproar.

Cudjoe deduces that Rowley “may have become disenchanted with the job or become so filled with hubris that he can’t be bothered to devote the sustained time and the attention the job requires.”

He has urged Rowley to “attend to his duties in a humble way.”

Not even that is expected to take place.