?Ken Ali and Kim­ber­ly Mack­han

For the sec­ond night in a row, Prime Min­is­ter Patrick Man­ning last night hugged the tele­vi­sion spot­light to boast of his Gov­ern­ment's achieve­ments.

Man­ning spoke for an hour to the na­tion and a live au­di­ence at Crowne Plaza, Port-of-Spain, de­tail­ing what he said were ac­com­plish­ments in vir­tu­al­ly every sec­tor of ac­tiv­i­ty. Com­mu­ni­ca­tions spe­cial­ist at the Of­fice of the Prime Min­is­ter, Paige de Leon, put out mem­bers of the me­dia from the Crowne Plaza. Man­ning and his wife, Hazel, along with oth­er mem­bers of his Cab­i­net, Peo­ple's Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) mem­bers and spe­cial­ly in­vit­ed mem­bers of the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty were in­vit­ed to a cock­tail re­cep­tion out­side the Crowne Plaza ball­room af­ter his ad­dress. To oc­ca­sion­al rounds of lusty ap­plause from a well-heeled au­di­ence, the Prime Min­is­ter spoke on mat­ters rang­ing from in­fla­tion and un­em­ploy­ment rates, from crime to Cli­co, from sav­ings to sports. "Look at Trinidad and To­ba­go now," Man­ning trum­pet­ed, stat­ing that peo­ple were re­turn­ing to T&T for "a far bet­ter qual­i­ty of life than many coun­tries in the world."

He said: "There are few coun­tries in the world that of­fer as many ben­e­fits and of­fer such a qual­i­ty of life..." Man­ning said na­tion­als were en­joy­ing "a high­er lev­el of sus­tain­able de­vel­op­ment." He said the Gov­ern­ment's ex­pen­di­ture in new build­ings was meant to cre­ate a "de­vel­oped city cen­tre" of Port-of-Spain "re­sem­bling sev­er­al me­trop­o­lis around the world." He said: "The time is now for you and your fam­i­ly to live in your own home. "The time is now for your chil­dren to as­pire to high­er ed­u­ca­tion with­out wor­ry­ing how mom­my and dad­dy would pay for it." The Prime Min­is­ter said the lo­cal econ­o­my was strong and had been well man­aged, cit­ing as proof the US$3.1 bil­lion in the Her­itage and Sta­b­li­sa­tion Fund, the coun­try's stel­lar cred­it rat­ing and its man­age­ment of the glob­al fi­nan­cial melt­down with lim­it­ed dis­lo­ca­tion.

About the sis­ter isle, he pro­claimed: "What To­ba­go wants, To­ba­go gets." In an ad­dress that was met by a stand­ing ova­tion at its con­clu­sion, Man­ning told of ad­vances in health­care, in the pro­vi­sion of State hous­ing, in sports and arts and of plans to di­ver­si­fy the econ­o­my. While the ad­dress took the tone of a mix­ture of an elec­tion man­i­festo and a bud­get speech, there was no of­fi­cial ra­tio­nale for the pre­sen­ta­tion with less than a week to go be­fore Mon­day's polls. A press ad­ver­tise­ment tout­ed the speech as a "state of the na­tion" ad­dress. Man­ning itemised a string of Gov­ern­ment ini­tia­tives but made on­ly one di­rect ref­er­ence to the elec­tion. He said that in his "new ad­min­is­tra­tion," he would call the lo­cal gov­ern­ment elec­tion "on time." That elec­tion has been put off on three oc­ca­sions.