On Corruption in the Caribbean: Remove Incompetence.

More and more, I find that I'm a tourist on planet Earth. I have a visitor from Suriname with me this week; we met in Guyana in 2005 - in fact, at Guyana Night, 2005. We had dinner with another modern gypsy last night, and the topics of discussion centered around Suriname because... even being only an hour away by air, there's so little that we actually know about Suriname. It's probably because they speak Dutch.

But my visitor also is pretty knowledgeable about Guyana, and with Guyanese Minister of Fisheries, Crops and Livestock, Satyadeow Sawh, gunned down with others yesterday, the talk turned to Guyana. The practices of using mercury for mining gold, which of course is bad for the environment. The large mining corporations involved claiming that they are using arsenic instead of mercury, when independent testing in areas where they claim they are not using mercury has proven otherwise.

It's a problem of the region and the world. Whatever brings in the most money seems to get a distinct blessing and a blind eye. It's sad. And it's the status quo. There was speculation last night that such things could have lead to the death of the Guyanese Minister; even as Basdeo Panday got sentenced to 2 years of hard labor here in Trinidad and Tobago. Of course, hard labor here in Trinidad and Tobago is baking bread for the inmates, so...

There are some that will say that there hasn't been corruption in any way. Some will defend Basdeo Panday; some will say that the beheading here in Trinidad and Tobago of a Minister's nephew wasn't related to crime, but when one adds up what the public is told - nothing really adds up. Nothing makes sense. If you start pulling at any one part of what is written, the story becomes unraveled before your eyes, and it's a sad state of journalism that allows that to happen... and it's a sad state of nations which causes that as well.

Yesterday evening, cornered, I was asked about what I thought of Basdeo Panday being sentenced. It's a politically charged question, of course, since he was the leader of the Opposition in the antiquated Westminster system we have in Trinidad and Tobago... but I did respond, and I responded loudly:

'Good. Now all we have to do is throw everyone else in jail and we're off to a good start. You don't clean a house by dusting off a table, you move the furniture around and you dust everything. And if people think that Panday alone is worthy of jail, we can expect the problems to continue. To thrive. It is unfortunate, however, that incompetence is not a crime, and that we elect people in authority who cannot do the jobs.'

I don't know why Satyadeow Sawh was killed; I will offer that bullets are not something I consider brutal anymore. I will offer that something is desperately wrong with a country where Ministers are assasinated, and that if one happens we may expect more. If pressed on the Panday issue, I can't tell you the intrinsics of why he was sentenced, and I cannot tell you whether he is guilty or not of the charges that put him into 'hard baking', but I can offer that if Panday is guilty then so are others - and corruption, despite what political parties say, is not endemic only to opposing political parties. It's systemic. It's devastating. It's our worst enemy, and allows incompetence.

And still, if you press me, I will tell you that the incompetence and lack of vision to me seems to be the greatest crime. We have lots of that in the region.

In fact, incompetence is a bit of a global issue... but I wonder, how can any region complain about other groups of people not being concerned without demonstrating concern themselves? And shouldn't that concern be, at the least, as focused on incompetence as corruption? And if incompetence gains focus, which government in the Caribbean region can afford to be taken to task on that?