What happens after 107 days of Emergency Powers and Curfew: Emerging from the Emergency

The State of Emergency is over, for now. As it was in the beginning, so it is at the end. For 107 days the engines revved at high speed, with little forward movement. No new law; no new magistrate or court; and no additional prosecutors brought in to work on the new cases. One hundred and seven days later, it is the DPP who needs four Senior Counsel from the Criminal Bar working with him. Instead the Government has that facility, ending 107 days when the police service and Government became indistinguishable. If the prosecutions fall apart; crime persists and the scandals in Government come in daily doses, the country will face a major question. What next?

For now the way forward requires a reconsideration of the party politics as the centre of gravity in the country. The anti-gang arrests exposed the decay of communities, peace shattered by drug dealing and the attractions of crime. Instead of strong communities and leadership within those communities, centralised governments firmed up their tentacles through the range of social projects, easy money and political friends with benefits.

It is a largely irreversible cycle of birth, drugs, guns, crime, political handouts and death. The political problem is the duplication of the same party rivalries across parliamentary and Local Government elections, voiding genuine community activism and sidelining issues relevant to each community. Community politics, incorporating local school boards, facilities and infrastructure and the provision of services by community NGOs must be the new foundation stone towards the forward movement.

The Emergency days also demonstrated that basic needs of the country have been surrendered to expensive and ineffective centralised government, inefficient for two reasons. First it is impossible for politicians to manage long-term planning, policy making, service delivery and popularity at the same time.
Second, very few politicians actually possess the skill and experience to manage a large workload and multitask through the demands of the Government.

 A threat to assassinate Government Ministers: Fact and Fiction

The Government is addicted to terror plots and this one carries the unmistakable sub-title of an Islamic plot against a Hindu theocracy. And despite its alleged hand in uncovering this assassination plot, the US is not too troubled. That is uncharacteristic of the Americans since Islamic terror plots and political subversion by drug cartels have spawned billion-dollar spending by the US, and reams of policy paper. But the US has not issued a travel alert to warn its nationals of Trinidad and Tobago's potential danger and it has made no extra effort to secure its vital LNG supplies. Trinidad and Tobago supplies 40 percent of US LNG imports, critical in this winter. So either the US has lost interest in fringe radicals and drug cartels or our Government needs addiction therapy.

Political distrust is more heightened since the emergency and curfew. People want to believe but there's too much distrust. Why would anybody want to harm the political leadership? So far they are doing a pretty good job themselves. Towards the end of the last Government's shortened term, the country increased its watch on the state companies, wary of carefree politicians and their friends who believe that state coffers are instant jackpots. Around traditional feeding troughs the country increased its surveillance and every day the media subjected the politicians to analysis and fact-checking, alert to spin doctors and propaganda. And the Government has been caught, more than once, with increased frequency.

The fact is that when it comes to political threats, no high precision rifle can kill political ambition like the ill-conceived $300 million giveaway. No subversive material convinces of ineptitude as a super-sized DNA bill and more legislation which attacks fundamental rights in the name of the rule of law. Overzealous ministers side-stepping basic public policy doctrine are more frightening than men in balaclavas plotting instability. Political guesswork poses a greater danger to the country than any factual or fictitious terror script and the PM's press conferences will soon rival Ripley's "Believe it or Not".

FIFA, bribery and Trinidad & Tobago politics: And Jack plays on

Minister Jack Warner

In politics, perception is often more important than reality. Google the phrase "Jack Warner bribery" and in 0.11 seconds you get 1.6 million results. Worse than that: Google "Warner bribery" and when you get to the second "b", Google intuitively redirects you to "Jack Warner bribery". No Prime Minister who is serious about restoring the rule of law and good governance will ignore the impact of this. Yet, the country is stuck with Warner, as the PM skips first principles of good governance.

In May 2011 the PM declared her support for Warner. This as Warner was forced out of FIFA amidst serious bribery allegations. The PM left the bribery allegations for FIFA to deal with. Warner did not give FIFA that opportunity; his resignation from FIFA effectively ended the matter. With the allegations unresolved, the PM had a compelling reason to consider the impact on her Government. She opted not to, and though she subsequently reduced Warner's portfolio, that appeared unrelated to the FIFA bribery allegations.

In October a video from the bribery meeting surfaced and public interest revived. The PM passed that off to the Attorney General, emphasising her continued underweighting of the events in the context of her party, government and country. Going forward it makes the PM complicit in her neglect of the first principles of good governance.

Feeding the beast

 In 2005, the first year murders averaged one a day, the Government planned to spend $8 million a day on national security and $5 million a day on social programmes. It actually spent $8 million a day on national security but more than $11 million a day on social programmes.

One year later, the spending on national security was about the same but social spending increased to $13 million a day. In other words, from 2005 to 2006 the Government more than doubled its spending on social programmes in an attempt to fight a list of woes, crime mainly. The lack of results is obvious. But even worse, the PNM MPs have condemned the $300 million plan, deeming it an insulting handout. The PNM criticises handouts?

Just over a decade ago then UNC Minister of Finance Brian Kuei Tung shared the same idea of using job creation to deal with crime. In his 2000 budget presentation Mr Kuei Tung promised that his Government would do everything possible to fight crime: "Our crime-fighting programme depends on the creation of jobs, providing better quality education and investing in law enforcement."

Neither Mr Kuei Tung nor the rest of the country could see into the future. With all the optimism and promises, in less than a decade the annual murder toll exceeded all the murders for the five years which preceded Kuei Tung's statement. And the year preceding Kuei Tung's promise would be the last time murders would be less than 100 for the year. In fact, despite the political optimism, increased spending and the creation of more and more ways to pipe funds into the crime hotspots, the annual murder rate would quadruple in less than five years.

The country is now spending over $13 million a day on national security and social spending is all over the place. One out of every five dollars earned by the country goes into the fight against crime and social decay. We are about to hand out even more, with the usual optimism and promise of positive results. Except that we have a decade of experience to learn from, if we needed to and that $300 million is seed-money for criminal enterprise.

Political hands mapping DNA law

The proposed DNA law will be measured by the Government's handling of national security: the reckless appointment of the anti-narcotics czar; the use of emergency powers with the weakest justification of yet unknown major national security threats and the deployment of the police and military to rounds-up without cause. Add the lowest level of trust in the politicians, the police and police spokespeople who create law as they go along. Even with its positive changes, if it becomes law, the new DNA Act will give national security's Mr Bean something else to bungle.

Fooling around with DNA sampling has dangerous consequences. DNA sampling protects the society with its potential for early detection, arrest and conviction of offenders. But it also interferes with the fundamental rights of the individual to security of the person and privacy. To be effective the legislation must balance these competing interests; to be fair it must support crime-fighting and not just carry the permanent watermark of the State of Emergency.

To measure effectiveness and fairness, the DNA debate must focus on two areas: the extension of DNA sampling without consent to all offences and the differences between the current and proposed legislation. Both the current and proposed legislation go against the grain of DNA legislation.The current arrangement restricts the use of sampling to indictable offences and summary offences punishable by imprisonment for more than six months.

But the new legislation will permit DNA samples to be taken without consent in all offences. DNA is not useful in every criminal offence.

Dredging up the fingerlings

Faced with evidence of abuse of the anti-gang legislation, the Government has lobbed the scholarship issue into the crowd mainly to distract. The scholarship issue is about race and misbehaviour which should not go unpunished. But before it ends, the State of Emergency is a more urgent discussion. It has done nothing the law in its usual course could not have done and has failed to treat class, connections and privilege with indifference.

In east Port of Spain the State has freely experimented with the grey tones of anti-gang legislation and emergency powers. It will not do the same in Westmoorings, Valsayn, Gulf View and Lange Park. The State will not shutter Frederick, Queen, Charlotte and Henry streets and search business premises but it will lock down and purge Beetham, Enterprise and Sea Lots. The State will not sweep through the yacht clubs, marinas, down-the-island homes and waterfront homes with boat slips, but will kick down Nelson Street doors. The irresistible conclusion is that the creators of the State of Emergency narrowed its ambit from the outset.

There are more dangerous consequences to the Government's selectivity than the current rancour over the State of Emergency. The diagnostic images show no change in the status quo, we having avoided the more serious treatment. For 18 months the Government has tinkered with legislation aimed at fingerlings but has developed no lure for the big fish. Race and proportionality will provide inflammatory discourse but we cannot go there for answers.

Rather than solve, the emergency has highlighted the class-centred problem.

Review and revamp the National Insurance Board

Since NIB's creation 40 years ago, the worlds of social security, finance and investments have undergone significant change. So too has corporate governance and NIB is no mom and pop shop. The NIB takes in more than $2 billion annually and has an asset base of about $20 billion. It is a significant shareholder in Trinidad Cement Limited, Republic Bank and the Home Mortgage Bank, cumulatively worth $3 billion. NIB is a big player in the local bond and equity markets and it must be insulated from political and corporate interlopers.

A modern NIB does not need a tripartite board in which the Ministry of Finance accepts whoever is nominated by unions and employers. The country has no guarantee that the nominees have the technical skills and personal attributes to guide and govern an entity of NIB's significance in the local economy. What the NIB needs is a board with the expertise to manage a major social security organisation and going forward employers and unions may still be asked to nominate persons with specific skills.

Secondly, NIB's social security benefits administration and its investment functions should be separated. Government should pursue a model in which it splits the social security and fund management functions of the NIB; it widens the scope of the NIB to cover administration of all social security and State benefits; it places the management and investment of the NIB's funds into the hands of an expert institution and it determines the future of NIB's subsidiaries and investments, having regard to the NIB's core business.

It means revisiting NIB's investment in and relationship with NIPDEC, its wholly-owned subsidiary.