The Keith Rowley Conundrum...

In 2009 Dr. Keith Rowley stood up in this country's Parliament and told the nation that he had gone to then Prime Minister Patrick Manning and warned him that there was “massive bid rigging and corruption taking place at UDECOTT that was ten times worse than (what took place at) Piarco,” yet he never adequately explained what he did for the six years that followed, six years in which he accepted Cabinet appointments in a Cabinet that he knowingly believed to be led by a willing and informed co-conspirator in the sins named above, six years in which he ate Cabinet food and drank Cabinet wine, six years in which the record shows he did nothing else whatsoever to attempt to rescue this nation from the wholesale pilferage he KNEW was taking place by men and women of the very Cabinet of which he was a part, celebrated six Christmases and Easters, dressed up for six Indian Arrival and Emancipation Days, played six Carnivals, counted two thousand one hundred and ninety odd days  and watched them go by with nary a word to anyone else, not the Integrity Commission, not the Fraud Squad, not the Commissioner of Police, not Transparency International, not the media, not his neighbour, nor the man he bought his tomatoes from, no one and nothing, until he was fired.

Then he was a veritable fountain of knowledge, spouting from the hallowed hilltops of those sacred halls information that he withheld from the people of Trinidad & Tobago for his own selfish interests, conspired to deceive them so that he could continue to advance his own agendas, feather his own nest as it were, but only when the ruse of his own masquerade as an able Minister of Government was up and he was left wanting did he then attempt to throw his leader under the bus, to smear and besmirch his name for sins he accused him of knowing for six long years, yet he as a senior member of Government who also knew, also did nothing, while the systematic rape of the people's treasury was allowed to go on unimpeded.

And yet and despite this and for whatever reason they can muster as to the unmeasurable depravity that has allowed this political charlatan to rise so high despite never having accomplished anything of real value to anyone while holding public office, the people of the People's National Movement defend him as leader. A simple walk through the die hard PNM communities in the Diego Martin West constituency that he has represented for twenty five years will offer nothing but desperation, poverty, squalor, violence and the shadow of death. The people of these areas actually went backward on his watch, with illiteracy and under employment rates soaring, home ownership and entrepreneurship depleting, Richplain has become a veritable killing field at night, Covigne is a ghost town, Factory Road a shame for all who have to endure what they have had to suffer despite the party they support having had forty one years of political and economic control and two multi-billion dollar oil booms from which they could have been blessed, but from which they were marginalized and ignored.

Keith Rowley brings nothing original or of value to the table, has not piloted a Bill of note, advanced no real policy, but has instead and without shame dusted off his predecessors plans and policies and are now claiming them as his own and is making them as political promises in lieu of anything of his own making.

To paraphrase the writings of a contributor in Prague, the danger to Trinidad & Tobago is not Dr. Keith Rowley per se, but a citizenry capable of entrusting a man like him with leadership. It will be far easier to limit and undo the follies of a Rowley administration than to restore the necessary common sense and good judgment to a depraved electorate who would consider such a man for their Prime Minister. The problem is much deeper and far more serious than Dr. Rowley, who is a mere symptom of what ails this nation. Blaming the prince of fools should not blind anyone to the vast confederacy of fools that made him their prince. The Republic can survive a Keith Rowley, who is, after all, merely a fool. It is less likely to survive a multitude of fools, such as those who might make him their Prime Minister.