Has Trinidad Gone Mad?

[dropcap]L[/dropcap]ennox Sankersingh is a kind lawyer who defends me and my colleagues in matters before the magistracy. He has a small grandson who lives in Milton Keynes, Britain, the model town that was created from scratch in the 1960s using state-of-the-art planning principles. On a trip to Trinidad the child candidly concluded: “Trinidad is Mad.” Hmmm. I understand how Trinidad might feel. Here are five personal instances.

My last published article, was entitled “Five Fake Russian Goals”. From Facebook, and from various other sources, the reaction was: “What an idiot!” “He gone off his rocker.” “He mad.” How could he say these Russian World Cup goals, all so beautifully executed, were fake?”

From these comments I deduce that many Trinidadians, particularly the “bright” ones, are ill-read, misinformed, or illiterate. The article uses parody, humour and exaggeration to attack the Russophobic mania in the Western capitals. Illiteracy cannot distinguish between fake and real, has no capacity to interpret tone, intention and therefore meaning. No wonder such persons fall prey to fake mainstream Western media, vogue gobbledegook in Western academia, and bogus local bureaucrats and technocrats. The article gave certain clear cues which were blithely disregarded.

In 2002 government disregarded a proposal for economic diversification of 77,000 acres of Caroni Lands, one I wrote after consulting with over forty scientists and other experts. Government opted for its mad-cap Master Gas Plan. Community groups in the South West Peninsula and the West Coast rebelled. The plan, fourteen heavy gas-based industries, five large industrial estates, ports and roads and pipelines etc, was bound to fail. It was a neo-Liberalization plan hatched in Washington and London and sold to us as ‘monetization’, ‘diversification’ and ‘development’.

There was no gas for this. A global recession was on the rise. The economic maths, econometrics, did not add up. Over and over I called for a Cost Benefit analysis. By 2010 the entire plan, including smelter, its crown-jewel, collapsed.  For advocating a hard-nosed approach for real economic development against bogus development, I was labelled an environmentalist: the airy-fairy zany lover of swamps, trees and mangroves. “I am not an environmentalist,” I always plead. Look the environmentalist, they cry!

When I was in primary school in Claxton Bay I took up middle distance running. In Form Three at Naparima College I contracted tuberculosis. I was extremely ill and took tetracycline and visited the Old Hospital in San Fernando every school day and holiday for over a year for long-needled buttock injections.  I never gave up running. I ran everywhere, at school middle distances and marathon. There was a hill leading up to our house in Claxton Bay which I hated to stand in my way. “Why Barry [home name] running up the hill, Aunty?” my cousin asked my mother. “He crazy?”

I ran all the way to UWI, Columbia University, Oxford University and the British Officer Training Corps there. Why was this man running through the snow with weights in his webbing (knapsack-like) and boots? One Trini was disturbed. Why has he joined the imperialist British Army? Has he gone bonkers? I ran all the way to Sandhurst and came back armed with my officer pip. In early 1990, the US/UK invasion of Iraq was on the rise. This genocidal war was being marketed to young officers as just one more safari trip in the illustrious history of British overseas adventures. I told my HQ Lieutenant Colonel CO that this war was ignoble and sickly one-sided, like shooting rabbits in foxholes. This was open terrain, desert, not Vietnam. He was civil. He invited me to leave the army. I did. I visited our local Chief of Defence at Teteron. I was told to formally resign my UK commission before seeking enlistment here. After I did, the chiefs entertained no serious consideration of my possibilities in the Defence Force. Bonkers!

When I was eighteen I trained at the Raja Yoga Centre in St James Street, San Fernando. Ten years later, while at the Oxford Union Debating Hall, a picture flashed in my brain: a cow in extraordinary distress. I stopped eating meat and began a programme of extreme fasting. Three days at a stretch I would go without food or water. I also fasted on Thursdays. When the time came, in the Debe to Mon Desir imbroglio, I was ready. The government was breaking undertakings given and had precipitously smashed our Debe camp. We resumed camp in front of the PM’s office in St Clair, staying there for over two hundred and fifty days.

One day the government sent an ambulance for me. The health minister had insisted. I cussed. The plan was to get me into St Ann’s mental hospital, after forcing a bogus imprimatur from the Medical Association’s head. Debe to Mon Desir collapsed in early 2016, before the general elections; and the government was changed in November. St Ann’s failed in its quest to afford me its hospitality. What I assume little child Sankersingh meant was that things appear topsy-turvy in Trinidad, and by the norms of Milton Keynes, back-to-front, disorderly, haphazard. Why am I facing eleven charges before the courts again, while so many scheming bureaucrats, drug lords and gun runners are sitting free and breezy?