Things that matter

With so much going on, including the global reach of tyranny, it becomes difficult to pin down individual, urgent needs for public attention employing the limited space of a newspaper column. But, as has increasingly become the case, life in T&T tugs you back on direct course … sometimes quite brutally.

For instance, an early morning message from a relative last Monday reminded me of the degree to which repeated political campaign claims can be distanced from lived realities.

Phone in hand at 3 in the morning, lying on her side on the dry half of a narrow urine-soaked hospital gurney, she wrote painfully in broken sentences: “Nightmare urine bag leaking on floor and bed. stomach bag never changed, or anyone ask if I hungry.”

Yes, dear minister, “media people” will see the broken urine bag and wet bed long before a freshly painted, reconstructed wall or building. So, don’t hold your breath for apologies or lengthy explanations. Vigilance casts wide, not narrow eyes. We consider ourselves to have failed if an entire story has not been told —fresh walls and unattended broken urine bags included.

The day before that text, I was told by a chronically and seriously ill friend that she had been turned away from the A&E of the same public hospital because prior blood pressure readings, taken by another state health institution of between 208/134 and 214/147, weren’t high enough for admission and treatment.

These episodes are highlighted at the top of today’s dispatch only because they constitute matters of life and death. But the malaise extends across the vast spectrum of services over which there is both administrative and political oversight.

It is not that some things have not improved. For instance, the inhumanity of some official procedures has been successfully addressed with the help of diligent public servants. Yet, there is so much that can be improved through the intervention of political vision aided by administrative competence and commitment in the vast majority of other areas.

I am not going to apologise for raising the “digital transformation” story for the umpteenth time here. Fellow media correspondent, Mark Lyndersay, who is far more competent and perhaps even more passionate on the subject than I, has said almost everything about the enormous gap between stated intention and current reality.

No, minister, at the current rate and under prevailing circumstances, there is no possibility of leapfrogging into what, for many countries, is already the present but which, for us, remains the seemingly distant future. And, yes, we know and understand the limitations; not the least being an unenthusiastic public service engine room. But what now passes as digital gains are completely unimpressive micro-steps.

I have, in this respect, developed the bad, somewhat self-destructive habit of taking note of the working environments of the bureaucratic big-wigs—some of whom reminisce boastfully on the smell of paper and ink. The politicians awkwardly and incompetently employing social media and AI as supposed image-enhancing aids. The public service processes across three and four steps that can easily and logically be one.

Now, about that small pothole along the Southern Main Road in Curepe opposite the betting place. That one that has been causing drivers to veer marginally into oncoming traffic. I wrote about it exactly one year ago. It’s not a large or significant pothole. Nothing for an MP or local government councillor to rage over. A small one left behind years ago following what might have been the laying of water pipes.

Somebody had clearly screwed up and another declared: “leave dat so.” Because “leave day jess so” is how we do business around here.

It has apparently not been large enough for political points but has been used by people like me as an indication of how things work in this place. One of these late nights or early mornings, we will read or hear about the car proceeding north along the Southern Main Road in Curepe whose driver “lost control” and ran into an oncoming vehicle with tragic results.

So, today is not about global threats to enlightened progress spanning decades. It’s not about the climate crisis upon us. It’s not about election shenanigans and bacchanal. Neither does it sound the usual alarms about democratic relapses. It is about high blood pressure, urine on a hospital gurney, idle digital tools, and a small hole on the main road.

It’s about some of the many things that really matter at the end of the day.