While the bread and butter issues of the day blind us to other happenings, fact is, there are other things unfolding before our eyes that we are oblivious to because it is said oftentimes the obvious escapes us; thus, we might read from page to page, back to front, the newspaper and miss that day’s headline that practically screamed at us to be noticed is not unusual.
So while we bother our heads about Rowley being a human weapon of mass destruction – of his shut down of Petrotrin, of our roadways, of industries everywhere, of our buddy-buddy relationship with the US, with the relatively good life we lived and of being jealously referred to as little America, by other Caribbean people, nobody is noticing or articulating how there are no longer PNM strongholds that were off limit to others, to the UNC, to PEP, to any political straggler.
One sees Phillip Alexander walking through areas that were once seemingly owned by the PNM; when prior to Rowley, you had to have been insane just to breeze through; now Phillip calls out Rowley and the PNM in those same forbidden areas and damn them to hell. Not only that, former diehard PNMites are joining Phillip in his lambasting of the PNM and stand their ground in his defence.
At Mon Repos, the PNM small islanders’ capital in South Trinidad, one sees UNC flags and writings in that community – apparently not only accepted by the residents there but it is suspected that they, the residents themselves, established the area as a UNC one.
While Rowley has kept himself busy shutting down industries, have Renuka and Rohan braying like donkeys in his name, the balisier has been self-destructing as when things have passed their expiry date and are on the verge of extinction. When milk “buss” and fish spoil, you have to fling them as far away as is possible because the stench emanating from them is impossible to inhale.
The PNM under Rowley has become rotten fish and buss milk and on its own, it is headed for the political labasse where you dump unwanted things. Rowley came with his small boy Tobago envy to destroy Trinidad and has done it, but what we fail to notice is the unassailable truth that he has destroyed the PNM as it is now as dead as a Dodo in Tobago and its eulogy is now being written here in Trinidad. Mark my words.
While Bhadase, Capildeo, and Panday couldn’t do it, Rowley is the one who is to take credit for the annihilation of the PNM party and, as it is said, a bad snake often bites its own self. We might yet thank him.
L. Siddhartha Orie.
