Stop the carnival

Trinidad and Tobago seems to be drifting into a crisis, though what form it will take or when it will happen remains to be seen. Everyone, except perhaps core PNM, understands that "something has to happen", "things have to change". Wherever you go, you hardly hear anything else. It blasts out in the pre-carnival music, which is not a mere freeing-up but a volcanic surge of undirected energy, frustration and rage.

Every day brings some fresh outrage (today's papers: Cascade couple battered to death, grandchildren crawling about in their blood). Wherever you look, you find systems crumbling under the weight of neglect and incompetence and corruption. Dysfunctional families churning out angry and dispossessed kids, a police force that can't get a grip on the savagery and kidnapping and slaughter, schools and hospitals and law courts that belong in a museum, underworld organizations that run rings around every authority, hard drugs circulating freely, an impotent parliament, roads too choked to drive on, mainstream media that have long abandoned their responsibility to investigate and analyze, fundamentalist sects feeding on people's fears and uncertainties, laughable opposition parties splitting the opposition vote.

And a government that thinks it's absolutely wonderful. Which is squandering the national energy wealth on prestige projects, high-rise buildings, hopelessly ineffective strategies like an airship to tackle crime. A government that doesn't listen. A government that plans to do what it wants regardless of anyone — impose a ludicrous new constitution, build aluminium smelters that nobody wants. A government that has failed to stamp out the corruption that eats away at every corner of the social foundation, that has failed to alleviate poverty, failed to protect citizens, failed to provide leadership and direction, failed to communicate honestly. A government obsessed with the grandiose, out of touch with reality, "solving" problems by throwing money at them and setting up yet more new organizations. A government that can't tell the difference between a furious citizen and an Islamic terrorist wound up by al-Qaeda. A government happy to retain power through old colonial divide-and-rule tactics; a government fiddling while Rome burns.

Meanwhile the feteing classes fete. Expensive new cars roll onto the crumbling roads, 40,000 a year. A few thinkers protest, and are denounced as subversives. The prime minister builds a new palace. Cheap Chinese labour is imported to build yet more grandiose buildings. Middle-class families pack up and leave for Miami. Money rules. "Contact" rules. If you don't buy a ticket, you don't have a chance.

It is a recipe for upheaval. Trinidad has had upheavals before (1970, 1990), and perhaps is due for another, who knows. Tobago's innocence has been stripped away too. This is not a country given to organized protest of the sort that will stop a government in its tracks: otherwise it might do something dramatic that involved real sacrifice and commitment, like closing down the carnival.

But patience is wearing thin. You can sense it everywhere. And this is an election year, a time of heightened social, ethnic and political conflict. Everywhere, people ask how things have come to this pass, how their beloved country could be turning so ugly, what is to be done? There is no comforting answer: you sow what you reap. For decades now Trinidad and Tobago has prided itself on its resistance to rules and regulations, systems and planning, any restriction on individual freedom; flaunted its carefree spontaneity, its tolerance for slackness, its recklessnes, its willingness to live with "who cares?" and "anything goes". Now it has to live with the results.

How do you take back a country that at independence failed to take real responsibility for itself, whose fabric has been slowly unravelling ever since, and which now equates modernisation with a frantic rush towards industrialisation and "developed country status by 2020"? People develop a country, not industrial plants, overhead railways or palaces. And Trinidad and Tobago's people are beginning to understand that they have been let down by every post-independence government. Their political parties are discredited or untested. I keep wondering, where will they turn now?