For the last six months, the news­pa­pers have been in­un­dat­ed with ad­ver­tise­ments from the Gov­ern­ment at­tempt­ing to doc­u­ment what they have been do­ing, ads filled with turgid pub­lic sec­tor prose while life in T&T grad­u­al­ly de­cays. In truth, most Trinida­di­ans ex­pect in­com­pe­tence and are con­tent with it but of late, the “half-ar­sed-ness” is over­whelm­ing.

Pick any area of gov­ern­ment: fi­nance, tax­a­tion, bank­ing, se­cu­ri­ty, ed­u­ca­tion, wa­ter, elec­tric­i­ty, roads, hous­ing, health, etc, and de­spite protes­ta­tions from on high, on the ground, it’s a mess.

Of late, the Min­istry of Health (MoH), af­ter go­ing in­to hi­ber­na­tion post-COVID, has sud­den­ly come alive. Their ad­min­is­tra­tors are all over the news­pa­pers, whether open­ing emp­ty hos­pi­tals, in­ves­ti­gat­ing doc­tors, pranc­ing or mak­ing noise in front of schools. It’s all about what the MoH is do­ing for us. Who do they think they’re fool­ing?

Re­cent­ly, they seem to have de­cid­ed that they must be seen to be do­ing some­thing about obe­si­ty. This ac­tion from the same min­istry that dur­ing the COVID epi­dem­ic, could not tell us what per­cent­age of the deaths from COVID were in obese in­di­vid­u­als. Obe­si­ty and age over 70 are the two crit­i­cal fac­tors in COVID mor­tal­i­ty. Does any­one re­mem­ber be­ing told that? Does any­one re­mem­ber any sort of push to get peo­ple to lose weight dur­ing the three years of the epi­dem­ic? Not at all.

Part of the rea­son we have no sta­tis­tics about COVID mor­tal­i­ty and weight is be­cause our MoH does not have hos­pi­tal scales that can weigh heavy, ill peo­ple who can­not walk. So, no weights!

Well, that fits in with the two-year wait­ing time to see ba­bies with dis­abil­i­ties or the lack of lab­o­ra­to­ry agents for thy­roid ex­ams at the Er­ic Williams Med­ical Sci­ences Com­plex (EWM­SC) last month.

How­ev­er, for some rea­son, the MoH has now de­cid­ed to tell us about what they are do­ing for Non-Com­mu­ni­ca­ble Dis­eases (NCDs), which, re­mark­ably, in­cludes obe­si­ty!

This week, the full-page ad from the MoH was about NCDs. And what was the news? The news was that the MoH had host­ed a NCD sym­po­sium! Wow! The so­lu­tion to our NCD prob­lem. Host a talk show, ad­ver­tise it and fool a cou­ple vot­ers in­to be­liev­ing your MoH is work­ing for you.

Here is how they de­scribed the event: “In March 2025, the Min­istry of Health host­ed a Non-Com­mu­ni­ca­ble Dis­ease Sym­po­sium, ti­tled ‘An Ev­i­dence-Based Ap­proach to Man­ag­ing Non-Com­mu­ni­ca­ble Dis­eases in Trinidad and To­ba­go’.”

All cap­i­tal let­ters, of course, to fool peo­ple in­to be­liev­ing they are do­ing some­thing im­por­tant.

They went on to say, “The event show­cased key find­ings from the re­cent­ly com­plet­ed STEPS Sur­vey 2024 re­port along with the Can­cer Re­port for the pe­ri­od 2003 to 2020.”

STEPS? STE­UPS! What is that?

The fea­ture ad­dress was de­liv­ered by the Ho­n­ourable Min­is­ter of Health. How long are we go­ing to con­tin­ue this colo­nial at­ti­tude of call­ing min­is­ters “Ho­n­ourable this and Ho­n­ourable that?” Af­ter all, we got rid of the ships, can’t we get rid of the Ho­n­ourable and the chuck-up ties and suits of par­lia­men­tar­i­ans?

The usu­al risk fac­tors were cit­ed: un­healthy di­ets, lack of phys­i­cal ac­tiv­i­ty, ex­cess rum and cig­a­rette smok­ing, obe­si­ty, high blood pres­sure and high sug­ar. We have heard this ad nau­se­um! More old talk. What con­crete steps has the MoH tak­en to ad­dress this is­sue?

Twelve years ago, in April 2013, I point­ed out in the Guardian that “the Eval­u­a­tion of School Meals Op­tions found that 23 per cent of pri­ma­ry school chil­dren in Trinidad and To­ba­go were over­weight or obese, and 25 per cent of sec­ondary school aged chil­dren were over­weight or obese.

“In 2001 8.5 per cent of school chil­dren had been found to be over­weight and 15 per cent obese. That’s a dou­bling in 12 years.”

Twelve years have gone by. Twelve years ago, our food im­port bill was just over six bil­lion TT and the health bill to treat NCD-re­lat­ed dis­eases was an­oth­er six bil­lion. What is the sit­u­a­tion now? Thir­ty-three per cent of our school chil­dren are now over­weight or obese and must be think­ing of grad­u­at­ing from school to hos­pi­tal.

The chil­dren get fat while talk shows are held and noth­ing is done for them. Un­like oth­er Caribbean coun­tries like Bar­ba­dos and Grena­da, T&T has no Na­tion­al Nu­tri­tion School Pol­i­cy. We do not have school ed­u­ca­tion pro­grammes, we do not en­cour­age chil­dren to play out­side, we do not ban ad­ver­tis­ing of ul­tra-processed food in the me­dia and around schools, we do not tax rum and cig­a­rettes and we cer­tain­ly do not sup­port lo­cal farm­ers to pro­duce cheap­er, health­i­er food. This last is­sue is par­tic­u­lar­ly im­por­tant to­day.

As usu­al, the for­eign­ers will help us out. One pos­i­tive thing that will come out of the US tar­iffs is more ex­pen­sive im­port­ed food. That will do more for our obe­si­ty epi­dem­ic than the inane mouthings of politi­cians.