Please stop what you are doing, go into your wallet and take out ALL of your money and throw it out the window. In fact, wait and give it to the very next stranger you see. Don’t have cash? Head to the bank and withdraw a few hundred and then give it away. I can hear it already: “Steupss, this writer MAD! Who going and do that?”
You wouldn’t dare give away your hard earned money, so why are you letting the government do it?
One of our main issues as a society is that we constantly fail to hold those we’ve placed in office to their word. I find it hard to believe that despite the very apparent minus column in our pay slips we continuously forget that it is OUR money which funds the government. I’ll repeat it for the people in the back; the billions of dollars being spent on failed initiatives, incomplete plans, repaving ALREADY PERFECTLY PAVED ROADS comes from YOUR paycheck. A portion of the money you generate with every sent email and pointless meeting goes towards ensuring that our Prime Minister has a private helicopter at her beck and call , the cost of which usually runs between 5 – 10 THOUSAND USD per hour.
Added to this egregious spending we then have the friends and family syndrome so common to our shores, contracts are awarded to persons affiliated with government officials, companies often run by their families or those who have been open financial contributors during the party elections. So why are we allowing this? We are aware that this is the time where a high of number of Trinidadian nationals are going into business for themselves and diversifying the monopoly we’ve felt in a number of fields for several years. Then why is it that the same companies continuously hold government contracts? How is it that persons have made mint off no other business than that paid for with our money?
Consider simply nothing more than due process being afforded to us in the dealings of this country’s finances? Why can’t we have open tender processes and transparent selections? It is time that we move away from the Banana Republic image that the financial world has of us and the only way we can do that is to start taking steps to reduce the amount of corruption we have. With a clearly failed Intergrity Commission, what is going to be put in place to level some semblance of fairness?
Understanding that we can never truly eliminate corruption is it still totally utopian of me to think that we could at least try to limit it? This is a discussion that needs to be mentioned and needs to be given a fair amount of thought or we’ll be stuck in the same old cycles no matter where we place our X. Politicians only do as they please because we allow it, we have no one but ourselves to blame for the multitude of issues we presently face. What do we, the consumer, who place our government into office plan to do? How are we planning to get better not just for ourselves, but for the better use for our taxpayers’ dollars, instead of it just being used to give them nice things?
