Reading Rowley Right...

Translated from Spanish to english, Las Alturas means 'The Heights,' and clearly there were some serious 'heights' (as the young people say) at play in this entire fiasco that is now crumbling down without ever having been used. Adding to the legacy of mistakes that included the purchase of a boat that never float, building homes that could never be used and that had to be torn down is going to be a damning indictment on anything the People's National Movement says from here, but of all the 'heights' that one has to deal with where this latest scandalous fiasco is concerned, I am surprised that so many people missed Dr. Rowley in his defense of his track record, stated that this was just the latest in a series of attacks, that Kamla Persad Bissessar was now 'Baby Uff' to former Prime Minister Patrick Manning's 'Pappa Uff.' What was his message here? Clearly a sotto voce 'play' comparing the two to the Duvalier clan of the Pappa Doc and Baby Doc regimes that were famous for the Tonton Macoute extermination of tens of thousands of Haitians, but forget his hatred for the current Prime Minister, isn't he now calling out his former leader who he just finished lionizing and deifying as the best Prime Minister we have ever had only last week? So which is it? Is Patrick Manning the corrupt thief, guilty of enabling with full knowledge the wholesale looting of the nation's treasury through bid rigging and corruption for six long years under Calder Hart? Or is he, as we were told, such a blessing that a nation is fortunate if it produces one such stalwart in its history, we having been blessed to have spawned a legend whose shoes he admitted he would never fill, so how does he now come to refer to the same man as a brutal dictator and a murderer?

Will the real Keith Rowley please stand up?

And what about his defense of his spin doctor in chief Faris al Rawi, whose stint on the Housing Development Board should be the foil from which we draw comparison for his eager ambition to high office? The same Rowley and al Rawi who insisted that the sins of Lifesport were the responsibility of the line Minister who 'ought' to have overseen the activities of his Ministry and any of its charges and agencies, yet fail to see the irony, the culpability of Faris in his failure of his fiduciary responsibility over the same Las Alturas heights? Shouldn't Keith Rowley be dismissing Faris as we speak so as to walk the talk he walks so heavily? Isn't Faris at the very least materially responsible for the failure and because of such, unfit for public office? Where are the mea culpas? The outpouring of connected responsibilities that the opposition uses to hang the government from?

Again, the almost karmic irony here is almost laugh out loud funny, because, had the PNM been in office right now, this same Las Alturas fiasco would have been enough to pull them down from office if the same standard that they want to hold out to others were applied.

Keith Rowley's immediate replacement at the Housing Ministry Emily Dick-Forde said in her brief statement on the issue that she inherited 'a mess' and was 'appalled at the backward approaches being employed at the Ministry,' again not the most noble or stellar of endorsements for the man who has his heart set on running an entire country.

The cold hard facts that seem to dog Keith Rowley no matter how hard he tries to outrun them through distraction, deflection and misdirection is the abysmal failure of his own track record in office. The fact that not one but two major multi-million dollar projects failed under the People's National Movement over geological issues, Las Alturas and Tarouba despite that administration being led by two supposedly qualified geologists, one of whom was no less a person than the then Prime Minister, the other the focus of this Commission of Enquiry, Keith Christopher Rowley, the man one assumed would be able to read and understand the implications of a geological report on the suitability of a site, who has held the most loftiest standards for others to uphold, seems to have once again catastrophically flubbed his lines.

Will the multiples of millions spent on Las Alturas, like the multiples of millions spent on the 'unfloatable' MV Sue and the unstable, unusable Brian Lara Cricket Academy at Tarouba be also written off as just others in the numerous already written off as the cost of a PNM government? From the Caroni Racing Complex that cost billions without even a foundation to show for it to the latest 'heights,' how much will be enough for the people languishing in squalor and poverty of the shrinking PNM die hard communities, feeding flour pap as milk to their babies, dodging bullets, living hand out to hand out, defending a party long on theft, mismanagement, mistakes and corruption, and woefully and abysmally short on any people centered, country focused policies? How much before they too say enough?

Keith Rowley, you said once that we as a nation should judge you on your track record. Which track record were you referring to?