The media has been flooded with politics regarded flooding. The new Prime Minister has been flying around in a helicopter and taking tours of the flooded areas - inflicting her whims on the local elected representatives as she sees fit to the chagrin of just about anyone who wants to be chagrined. The rains come, Acts of God as any Insurance company would have in their legal documents, but I'll note that there doesn't seem to be a large proportion of people going to their respective places of worship and discussing rain with their Creator. Maybe that helicopter is getting in the way.
I've driven through quite a bit of flooding - especially in areas that have been under the control of the UNC for quite some time. And from my own experience, there is some truth to what Patrick Manning, former Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago (and perhaps the man to usurp the usurper in the PNM) once said. Paraphrased, bad planning causes flooding. And in areas that I have been to - that I have intimate knowledge of - such lack of planning has been encouraged by UNC representatives who seem quite content to get votes at the cost of poor planning. You know who you are. {Read more}
According to the Trinidad Express, 386,830 out of the 998,787 total electors voted in Monday's local government election (LGE), giving a 39% turnout. This was marginally higher 2003's turnout, which was allegedly 38%. I can find no trustworthy LGE figures online - the EBC doesn't publish them. Perhaps they, like the public, don't think it's important - but, then, why do they publish the THA election figures (which is like Tobago's LGE)? If you think the info on Wikipedia is correct, think again: their 378,637 figure for voter turnout is 42% the total electors from the EBC's Annual List 2003 - the Express story quotes the EBC's current Communications Manager, Leslie Fitzpatrick, as stating the turnout back then was 38%. So, as with anything from Wikipedia, take their data with a bit of salt. {Read more}
Just a quick pointer - while the Government of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago has put out the specifications for laptops that 'public' tender has started on (see the specs here), there were remarks made about a laptop in the local media (Newsday, perhaps? ) that did not do much to answer questions regarding a cheap laptop that India was making.
...The tablet computer, developed by researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi and the Indian Institute of Science in Bengalooru, will eventually be made available to the public. It will run on an open source Linux operating system with Open Office software and can be powered by solar panel or batteries as well as mains electricity. It will have no hard drive but users will have access to a USB port, 2GB of memory and a video-conferencing facility, internet browsing...
Is the present government of Trinidad and Tobago agile enough to reverse course and accomodate this technology, or is their political inertia going to press the citizens of Trinidad and Tobago to pay exponentially more for a political promise made with no plan in actually assisting educators and children?
I've just witnessed T&T's first national political debate prior to an election, televised live on CNMG's C TV (find the recorded video here). Here are my initial views.
First, I must, like others I've spoken with via facebook during the show, commend the T&T Debates Commission (TTDC) for facilitating the event, CNMG's C TV for broadcasting it over-the-air in T&T and over the Internet via their website (for free - take note Guardian Media Group), and the PNM and People's Partnership for agreeing to participate in this historic event. While critical analysis will follow in the hours and days ahead, constructive or otherwise, I am very grateful to all parties for taking such an important step to advance our political culture.
Here are some of the things I thought worked well. The TTDC published the debate format, and rules and guidelines for the participants, moderator, questioners and studio audience on their website so the public could assess beforehand. The TTDC also recognised (somewhat) the worth of social media in today's public relations strategies and created its own facebook page (as did C TV with its own pages for C News Live and First Up, their flagship programmes). {Read more}
Before I post the specifications, I'll add my commentary. The hardware requirements for the systems are well defined, exceedingly so. As a software developer with over 20 years of experience and as a software developer who has worked as a technical lead on projects with budgets in excess of $1 million dollars U.S., I have some concerns. I believe you should too.
The logical progression to hardware requirements for such a project are: (1) Identifying the problems, (2) Identifying the software to be used to solve the problems, (3) Identifying the hardware that runs the software (this treats the operating system as an extension of the hardware).
What we have here is actually the complete reverse - which leads me to question the competency of those who are undertaking the project. I could delve into more detail with what is wrong with these specifications but I don't want to spend more thought fixing their specs than they spent in creating them.
In short: This is stupid but it meets the government's apparent requirement: Meeting a political party's promises while assuring that money is spent on something that will have no measurable benefit in the context of education of the children of Trinidad and Tobago.
Here are the requirements, as posted on the main computing list of Trinidad and Tobago:
Since the election, I've been glad to hear the dolting adoration of the new government fall away into critical thought regarding how Trinidad and Tobago governs itself. That the new Opposition Leader, Dr. Keith Rowley singled out Jack Warner regarding a possible conflict of interest has created friction within the social networks around me.
I've read that Dr. Rowley was wrong to point at what could be a conflict of interest. I disagree - I think that no one is above this and would ask that anyone in government do the same, even Dr. Rowley. I've read ignorance on both sides and I've read more enlightened commentary from either side. The idea that this could be an issue has a lot of people delving into the laws, enough so that 'Make A Choice, Jack' has some teeth. Comments on that article reflect most of the discussion that I've seen, but a link to a YouTube video got me interested. The video linked to, here, doesn't seem too prejudiced.
Yet in looking around further on YouTube, I found the video below.
Now here's my question: Is this how Trinidad and Tobago should be represented? {Read more}
I first asked this question in the run-up to the recent General Elections and got a few responses. The general conclusion then was that voters only have the power to hold their representatives truly accountable when they stain their fingers in a polling station (or to a lesser extent in internal party elections, e.g. UNC, or leaving to form your own party, like COP). This power becomes diminished when we revert to traditional voting patterns of supporting the status quo despite their poor performance.
A recent discussion on facebook has added to this discussion, so I'm throwing it back out for response.
The Original Poster (OP) on facebook said: "I have always supported accountability and transparency in public office. My question to all who are now so rigid in this belief is: where was this strong requirement for accountability and 'holding government to their word' crusade during the last 8 years when the previous government was running this country with none of this? Did anyone attempt to make a complaint? Ask a question and got a satisfactory answer? Approach a Minister or MP for answers or demand action? Actually got in touch with a Minister or MP to ask a question or demand an action? We must all hold the [People's Partnership] very accountable for their actions and promises, but be honest and remember this is something that no other government offered in the past." {Read more}
The local media will be filled with things about this election. The winners and losers will point at each other for some of the thuggery that took place, there will be plenty of rhetoric from both sides and there will be investigations - I'm sure - into corruption charges of the last regime. How do I know all of this? My friends, we've seen all of that before. It's the soap opera of regime change.
But there have been a lot of promises made in the People's Partnership Manifesto - one of the two manifestos I have been critical of. The good news is that we now only have to worry about one. Before we worry about it, I'd like to point out that the manifesto was thrown together in less than a month and that, by itself, should lead one to understand the merit of some of those promises. I have no doubt in my mind that if either party thought they could have gotten the vote by promising free cheese sandwiches on every other Thursday, they would have promised that.
And it's that disparity of promises between the manifestos that is worth considering. The PNM promised something that 11 out of 41 seats were interested in. An interesting but hopefully silly thing to notice is that, based on this map, the closer one gets to Venezuala the more likely you voted for the PNM. Roughly 90,000 people on the North and South of the Gulf of Paria were majorities for their areas.If the People's Partnership could win everywhere else, how did they not win there? Look at the map. Isn't that odd?
What were the PNM promising in those areas that made them choose the PNM by majority? And why didn't the rest of the country buy into it? {Read more}
I started picking through the manifestos - both here and here. And when I started, I fully intended to complete a good fact check on each manifesto. To some degree, I have - and honestly, after a few days of staring at the 'contents' of each manifesto... I'm somewhat disgusted. So I stopped.
But my disgust isn't really so much about the contents as much as it is about people's reactions to the contents. This week, fortunately, we saw some dueling rhetoric between the political parties about manifestos. And that is healthy. But all of that assumes that a large number of people in the country don't read and are incapable of critical thought. And that is an insult to a lot of people that I know - and the education system of Trinidad and Tobago. Or maybe it isn't an insult. Maybe it's a description. And maybe that's why I am disgusted.
Or maybe I'm disgusted because these manifestos are the best that either political party could come up with - or would come up with. Lets be serious - at the end of the day these are politicians who aren't known for living up to their promises.
But I must compare myself to the politicians here and find myself of their ilk. I said I would do something and I didn't complete it. The good news is that no one of the readers voted for me.
That said, the PNM manifesto reads more like a CV than a manifesto, complete with exaggeration and innuendo like so many well written CVs. But at an interview, employers can weed that out. In an election, the interviewers typically don't - and the PNM counted on that. {Read more}
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