Sometimes one wakes up in the morning and one reads things in the newspapers that convinces one that T&T is a madhouse. It makes one feel the need to roll back into bed and go to sleep. “Wake me when it’s over,” as one of our former politicians once said, he being more a figure of speech than anything else today. Here are some of the more bizarre news items one recent week. It started off with the “wee-wee” discussion. The mayor of Port-of-Spain, in his infinite wisdom, decided to take on the bladders of a significant section of our womanhood by banning “wee-wee” trucks in Carnival bands on the spurious grounds that they were either (he seemed unable to make up his mind) a) a health hazard or b), nasty and smelly.

He was immediately attacked by a group calling itself MAUTI or Masqueraders Against Urinary Tract Infections and which claiming prejudice against female masqueraders because whilst he had provided the men with “walls aplenty” there was nowhere for women to “wee-wee”. At week’s end the discussion was still ongoing and it was understood that a group called MIFOWPO, or Men In Favour Of Women Peeing Outside, was arranging for a private showing of its “wee-wee” facilities throughout town. Over 41,000 people had applied for a firearm licence since 2002! What was most startling was the extraordinary finding that of the 215 people granted firearm licences in 2009, a majority or 144 were foreigners! Two-thirds of the new guns in town were not controlled by Trinidadians or Tobagonians.

Were these recent immigrants? Surely not workers from China? Were they security personnel? Drug lords? Badjohns? No explanation was given to the bemused public by an equally bemused Minister of National Security. Maybe it was to protect the “wee-weeing” women next Carnival? Then we had the case of the “brown water good to drink.” The assurance was given by WASA, those pillars of civic duty, that if you saw brown water flowing from your pipes, it was safe to drink. A complicated explanation about “increased inflows through pipelines” to “augment supply” due to “reduced production at the desalination plant,” due to “maintenance work” was given, plus the hearty assurance that WASA was “flushing its pipelines to improve the aesthetic quality of the water.” How wonderful of them.

Between “wee-wee” and WASA, where could a good man find a good gun? The situation, laughable as it was, then degenerated into farce with the explanation by a defence lawyer, in the case of a 23-year-old man accused of murdering his two-year old stepdaughter (17 injuries, death as a result of a “lacerated liver,” with “multiple blunt trauma injuries to her head and body as a contributing factor”), that this was simply a case, unfortunate no doubt, of a “spanking that went awry.” The man really had no intention of causing serious harm to the child, said the lawyer. That could give the calypso, “Lie, yuh hear lie,” competition. The same day 32 Form Five students at St Joseph’s College, St Joseph, were “strip-searched” by police after a student reported that $1,400 was stolen from him.

One parent reported that his 15-year-old daughter was stripped to her bra and panties and made to lie down on the floor, no doubt to make the “strip-search” easier. After one hour of “searching,” the money was still missing. No explanation as to what a “strip-search” entailed, what a student was doing with $1,400 in school, or why the principal allowed such drastic action. But by the end of the week, despite some weakish protestations by some of the parents, no one seemed to care and the fate of the $1,400 was still unknown. What effect the “strip-search” would have on the students was also unknown but surely it could not be as bad as the lack of “wee-wee” trucks which was still in the news. 

To cap off a sterling week we learned that some academics made a distinction between “good” and “bad” corruption. The eminent UWI academic Selwyn Ryan stated in his Sunday column that, according to these academics, “Good corruption was behaviour in which illegally-obtained public funds and crony deals were used to create developmental miracles. “Bad corruption involved the appropriation of public money that ended up in foreign offshore banks, conspicuous consump-tion, multiple gilded palaces, and other wasteful monuments designed to establish or burnish legacies.”

Understood? Simple, right?
At this point the realisation that the illegally constituted and uniformed Sautt group was looking for blimp pilots and that the Government was in talks with a Brazilian company about an aluminium smelter at the same time that Alcoa was reducing the amount of Surinamise bauxite sent to Carenage and that the Minister of Legal Affairs was actually saying that Government had won the battle against high food prices was too much for even the most hardened of Trini observers and we all rolled over and went back to sleep, only to start having nightmares about some Chinese living in barracks guarded by Nigerians.

Thoughts:
The mayor decides to ban ‘wee wee’ trucks in Carnival bands. Of the 215 people granted firearm licences in 2009, a majority of 144 were foreigners. Then there was the case of the ‘brown water good to drink.’