Made in Foreign

The yuletide season is upon us and there will be no doubt much hustling and bustling as people maketheir last minute preparations for the big day. The docks at Point Lisas and Port of Spain will be teeming with activity as vessels stream in from foreign lands laden to capacity with all manner of different products destined for consumption in the festive period and beyond. Garments, gadgets, curtains, hams, biscuits, alcohol, perfumes and toys are just some of the items that would be unloaded from these freighters and find their way into our shops. Once there, smiling proprietors with dollar signs in their eyes would be rubbing their hands together in anticipation of the subsequent mint to be made. For it has long been engrained in our Trini psyche that ‘‘made in foreign’’ is better than ‘‘made in Trinidad and Tobago’’.

It seems that even our Governments have picked up with this attitude because I have watched with bated breath over the last few years as foreign expert after foreign expert is brought in to solve this or that problem in Trinidad and Tobago - all to no avail. Now the Government wants to go one better and appoint a foreigner as the next Trinidad and Tobago Police Commissioner, for rumour would have it that the shortlist has been whittled down to two candidates; an American and an Englishman. For the first time in our independent history an office of high prominence would be held by someone not native to our shores. I find that extremely disconcerting and the patriotic blood in me has started to simmer, meaning that I could no longer stay silent.

What vexes me more than anything else is the two-faceness of the situation and the dotishness of those purporting to govern us. The Special Anti-Crime Unit of Trinidad and Tobago and the Police Service itself are the closest things that we have to the American FBI or the English equivalent, MI5. To simply join (never mind having any aspirations of high office) either the FBI or MI5, you must be a citizen of either the United States or the United Kingdom, and in the case of MI5, you must have been resident in the United Kingdom for at least 10 years. But it seems that anything goes in banana republics like ours so foreign crime experts are sought out from overseas, sworn in to maintain law and order in a land that they know nothing about, and then given ranks ranging from Corporal to Assistant Commissioner of Police. According to some reports, the two foreign ACPs are on a monthly salary of about $100,000.00 TTD (not a misprint) in addition to perks - all in all not bad work if you could get it.

No one is saying that seeking help and assistance from abroad is wrong, but speak to anybody and they will tell you that things seem to be getting worse not better, since the foreign invasion. Much of the money spent on these imported experts is therefore wasted - much like a man who buys a Picasso and then hangs it in the latrine behind his house. No amount of money spent of hired foreign help will alleviate the systematic problems that have become embedded within the fabric of Trinbagonian society. By this proposed appointment, the government is basically saying that not one of the several thousand men and women in the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service is fit to run it. That is a strong indictment indeed against the rank and file of the TTPS. If things are indeed that bad then I struggle to see how bringing in a single man from the outside and placing him at the head of the organisation will rectify this. After all, the whole can only be equal to the sum of its parts. No foreign Commissioner of Police can make much of a difference when his constables are renting out their guns to bandits. Nor can he effect much change when the police service is still short several hundred men and vehicles. How can he lower the crime rate when we have hundreds of men and women sworn to maintain law and order fixing cars at Traffic Headquarters in Sea Lots or painting the barracks in St. James? Change for our police service, when it does come, will and must come from within. Post-Saddam Iraq is full of British and American experts in everything from construction to technology, yet the country cannot be seemingly pulled out of its anarchic state. What necessarily works in Britain and the USA does not automatically work elsewhere- Or as we Trinis would say Gopaul luck aint Seepaul luck!

For me though, this issue is much bigger than police and thief and much bigger than dollars and sense. For me, it is a matter of national pride and self-interest. What message does this send out to young eager police officers, or to the rest of our young people for that matter? These appointments say to them that in spite of how hard you try, or how honest you are, or how competent you are, the foreign applicant will always be deemed to be better than you. For every imported Professor Stephen Mastrofski, we ignore the likes of our very own Ramesh Deosaran. For every Leo Beenhakker, we ignore the likes of our very own Everald Gally Cummings. How long before the Government decides to appoint a foreigner as the head of the Fire Service or the Prison Service or even the Defence Force for that matter? Before we know it, we’ll be reading in the papers:

‘‘Recently retired British Prime Minister Tony Blair has signed a five-year contract with the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago to be the leader of the twin-island state. The outgoing T&T Prime Minister Patrick Manning was quoted as saying that Tony Blair and his team will bring great experience and much needed insight (hitherto lacking) into the vocation.’’

Messrs Manning and Joseph, I implore you to wake up and rethink your position before you sleep walk my country into colonisation by imperial masters again-this time by proxy. If this is the developed-nation vision that you have for 2020 then I beg you both to test your eyes-for I suspect that you may well have a cataract or two.

Prophet