Some thoughts have been floating around in my head for some days now, and crystallisation is a bit difficult… not so much that I don’t know what it is in there, but more so to find the words to articulate the shit I observed. Still, a little prompting from Reginald Dumas triggered off a flood of cognitive assembling; a condensation of several floating wisps as it were.
Dumas has it right… those who crawl on the Rock will continue to crawl at the feet of their new masters, the élite* and corrupt.
I have a heightened sense of hopelessness and despondency that, during my lifetime, I will see the rise of the masses through critical thinking and rejection of the ‘gimme, gimme’ attitude. Make no mistake, it is all I see at present. Nothing else can explain the situation where a man who was deemed corrupt, a thief and a liar can actually be endorsed by the masses as their saviour. What a let-down from 2000 years ago, eh?
In a trade-off for a few box drains and some road paving, the people of Chaguanas West are willing to open their arms for the man who made no secret of dipping into State coffers. Give him the keys to the public purse and he will give them more box drains and some more smooth roads and in the meantime, if his own pockets are not deep enough, he will move from wearing shallow-pocket jeans to deep-pocket suits… and leech and leech and leech… but who cares? Certainly not those who want betterment. The ‘here and now’ small-minded thinking is appalling but expected from this writer.
“There is something worst than corruption as we normally define it and that thing ladies and gentlemen is the emergence and strengthening of the culture of compartmentalisation. On one hand we concentrate a laser-like attention on ourselves and our personal interests and on the other we expand our deficit of action on what can be beneficial to the society of which we are an integral part by which we are daily affected and among which we profess ourselves so gravely concerned,” Dumas said.
“We are more and more unmindful of the intense irony of that contradiction which in practice leads to a proliferation of the same corrupt activity of which we say we disapprove,” he said.
Not that I endorse the UNC either. Here we have a party who went overboard in the primping of power… or should I say pimping of power? A minister leasing a vehicle for himself at a cost of $24K per month when there is absolutely no need… merely the desire to appear to be important. A Board member with the same desire and same scam. A surge of private buildings for government officials done by a contractor who is suddenly given a boost in contracts.
The corruption, and appearance of corruption, is far and wide the most we have ever seen from any government, and that includes Panday’s… which is saying something.
The second group of thoughts I had were in a sense different to the above.
After 22 years, John Kalicharan was freed from a prison sentence that is ‘not known in law’. Pay attention. Not known in law means it was an abuse of the judicial system, and the judiciary, to sentence the man to what he was sentenced, in this case ‘four ten-year sentences should have been made to run concurrently instead of consecutively.’
Additionally, he was denied the opportunity to present a defence by the judge.
In 1989, he appeared before a judge at the High Court on four counts of armed robbery. His defence was that at the time of the robberies, he was in custody at a police station along with four other men and as such, could not have carried out the offences.
Kalicharan gave the court the names of the four men with whom he was in custody at the police station and requested that they be summoned to come to court and give evidence on his behalf.
He had also asked for extracts from the diary at the police station to be produced in order to prove he was in fact in police custody at the time of the robbery.
However, the trial judge refused the request and proceeded with the trial before finding him guilty and passing sentence.
So for 22 years an (more than likely) innocent man sat serving a sentence that was an abuse of judicial discretion and abuse of the rule of law… pointing back and linking to the first situation where I keep observing that those who crawl on the Rock are bound by their inferior thinking skills and inability to mature. In both situations, the concept of rule of law is thrown out, not merely ignored. It is a sorry situation where the public is used, abused and shafted and yet never realise that, while bending over and taking it up the nether hole, that is not pleasure it’s feeling, but pain.
* élite – enjoying superior economic or social status.
