WHAT MODEL NATION?

I was lapping up Radio Toco’s feast of Mighty Sparrow’s gems when my eyes fell on the Express editorial. 

“With less than two months to go,” the newspaper wrote, “there is not even a peep anywhere in officialdom regarding plans to commemorate the milestone event of the country’s 60^th anniversary of Independence”. 

So, I naturally reflected on Sparrow’s 1962 contribution to Trinidad and Tobago’s Independence Calypso Monarch Competition. 

At that time, Birdie was challenging the authorities on prizes – calypso winners got a few dollars while the Jaycees beauty queen drove off with a new car – and he was victimised into second place, and Lord Brynner named Independence monarch. 

But Sparrow’s timeless Model Nation expressed the young nation’s aspirations in the big wide world. 

“Spread the word anywhere you pass, 

Tell the world there is a model nation at last.” 

His patriotic lyrics built on the rousing rhetoric of Dr. Eric Williams, who said on Independence Day that T&T “will strengthen our democracy by improving our economic foundations”. 

As it turned out, Prime Minister Dr. Keith Rowley had just returned from Caricom talks, and reported on a planned regional approach to food production and security. 

Six decades after Williams’ inspirational addresses on nationhood, T&T is still importing most of what it eats – to the astounding value of $6 billion a year – even as food shortages and inflation rage around the world and the United Nations forecasts widespread under-nourishment. 

It is not easy to determine how Caricom could help to fix this country’s dreadful security woes, which Rowley had promised in 2015 to mend with an “all-of-government” approach. 

The government’s latest throw of the dice is an about-face on the Bail Bill by its embattled Attorney General Reginald Armour. 

In 2016, as head of the Law Association, Armour said the legislation had not “acted as a deterrent to crime”, but in the Senate last week he insisted it had had “a significant and far-reaching impact”. 

Six years ago, he said statistics do not show the law to have reduced the crime rate, but last week he claimed the legislation “offers safety and security for everyone”. 

On Independence Day, Williams said “democracy means protection of the weak against the strong”, but T&T is losing its middle class, as the rich grow richer and the ranks of the working poor and unemployed keep swelling. 

An underclass is mushrooming just as in the 1980s, when George Chambers taxed everything in sight and A.N.R. Robinson imposed tough IMF sanctions, including slashing public officers’ salaries.  

T&T is the only country in which commercial banks increased profits during the Covid-19 lockdown – literally billions! – while one-in-four small businesses shut down as a result of skewed official policies. 

The authorities (and deadbeat trade unions) continue to look the other way while a pharmaceutical importation monopoly is expanding profits, at the expense of the dispossessed. 

Big operators, including a major supermarket chain, are growing while small investors are being driven out of business. 

While deprivation is a factor in youth criminality – Professor Selwyn Ryan warned a decade ago that it was “a dagger aimed at the soft underbelly of the capital city” – Rowley simply dismisses the scourge as the effect of “bad parenting”. 

A land riddled with crime from classroom to church is not what Williams anticipated in his soaring speeches or Sparrow in his epic calypso. 

Professor Theodore Lewis hit a popular refrain in terming the social and economic problems of urban communities the result of “PNM abandonment”, and called on the ruling elites to “own the problem of their constituents”. 

Instead, the government keeps tossing up scapegoats, and now we are told that public protests by restless youths are crafted by political opponents. 

Williams had hailed our national institutions as symbols of our self-determination. 

But procurement law remains a non-starter amid billion-dollar purchases, the judiciary is badly broken and lawmen cannot even hold criminals stealing copper cables near to their police stations. 

The public service is as sluggish as it was depicted by V.S. Naipaul in the 1960s, the public health sector is woeful, and educational standards are not meeting the demands of a fast-changing world. 

And whatever became of integrity and whistleblower laws?  

Williams reminded the nation on Independence Day: “You are nobody’s boss and nobody is your boss”. 

In calling for 60^th Independence anniversary observations, the Express acknowledged – in an understatement – that “we are facing a crisis of governance…” 

Our diversity remains our strength, as Sparrow noted. 

Still no major indifference 

Of race, colour, religion or finance.” 

Williams had advised: “Let us show the outside world the united front of a nation thinking for itself”.  

But, 60 years later, who could suggest that Trinidad and Tobago matches the picture painted by Sparrow and Williams?