IT’S happening before our eyes.
Attorney Gilbert Peterson pocketed almost $9 million with respect to the Commission of Enquiry into the Paria diving tragedy that took the lives of four innocent and diligent workers.
Families of the disaster victims have not received a cent in compensation, Paria’s Board of Directors – headed by government insider Newman George – is still in place, and recommendations for manslaughter charges are ignored.
The dead-end commission of enquiry cost taxpayers more than $15 million.
Port workers are clamouring for a salary deal going back to 2013, public officers got four per cent for a similar period, and several pension funds are running out of money.
The working class is struggling with starvation wages amid skyrocketing cost of living while the wealth gap expands.
Evidence of hardship is everywhere – increased poverty and malnutrition, growing homelessness, higher school dropouts, health crises.
Circumstances are so dire that the authorities urge the common\ man to return to coal pots and to cook less macaroni pies as we await monetisation of an uncertain energy project.
In the midst of the most dismal quality of life since the 1980s, our national leaders are implementing one of the most bizarre and perverse official decisions since national independence.
Prime Minister Dr. Keith Rowley’s acceptance of salary increases for his non-performing administration and other top office holders is wicked, outrageous and vile.
The move by the authorities to feather their own nests while many scramble for food amounts to an act of authoritarianism and raw abuse of national power.
It is the most graphic example yet of the Government’s insensitivity to the plight of the common people whom they were elected to serve.
It is an explicit example of arrogance.
The Rowley Administration is baring its face as grossly self-serving and heartless.
Apart from striking it rich in public office, the authorities have neutered independent organisations and intimidated many commentators into chronic silence.
Such high-handedness is a longstanding PNM mode of operation.
As far back as the 1970s, the Mighty Sparrow sang in “Prophet of Gloom and Doom” of the PNM rulers’ tendency to brand critics as “bellyachers,” “nefarious” and “a crazy and a crack.”
Sparrow intoned: “If you tell them the economy is no longer in full bloom/You become a prophet of gloom and doom.”
Rowley clearly felt he could take such high-handed action because of a lack of fear of electoral defeat and the muting of the masses.
But pride goeth before a fall.
Within the next few months, citizens would determine whether they are at ease with such cavalier, detached leadership.
Conscientious nationals accept that their leaders must be suitably paid, but wanton lifestyles in the face of widespread agony are disturbingly obscene and shameless.
They are symptomatic of an administration that has lost touch with reality and the crude truth of the man on the street.
Power corrupts, the adage says, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
The leader’s interests, Sun Tzu advocated, must always be aligned with that of the people.
But Sparrow’s analysis decades ago still holds true today.
“To tell them their performance is below par/It is poetic to hear them tell you who you are.”
In all of this, the salary hike for national bosses is indecent and immoral.
