Was it a Freudian slip or the sarcasm of an intellectual to ingeniously pinpoint the major failures of this government (roads and water) as Dr. Rowley’s signature success and as justifiable reasons to award him the honorary doctorate or was it another example of a diehard PNM (formerly of Port of Spain) who, still carries the torch of Eric Williams for balisier supremacy in this country, playing smart with foolishness by rewarding failure with pomp, pageantry and a doctorate?
We all know the expression, once a PNM always a PNM and Wayne Fredericks long years away from Trinidad and notwithstanding his foray into the academic world, cannot avoid the fact that his navel string is buried somewhere in Port of Spain, probably at the epicenter of the PNM genesis, at Woodford Square, which Eric Williams regarded as a satellite campus of Howard and renamed it “The Peoples’ Parliament” after his stint ended in America and he was in search of the IQ-challenged in T&T to lecture to.
Williams too, like Frederick, was a born and bred Port of Spain boy and while Williams went to QRC, Fredericks was a student of the rival St. Mary’s College. It would not be wild speculation to suggest that Frederick has been a disciple of Williams and that in perpetuating the ideology of Williams and the PNM, of adding to the nonsense that Williams was the brightest man in the universe, he anoints Rowley with a doctorate who now totes two of them (one real and one just counterfeited) to probably elevate him to the status of brightest man at least at balisier house.
It might not be too fanciful to say this development might be as a counter to Kamla’s boast that she is the brightest person in the UNC and that she came first in her law class and was a lecturer in English at Mona. This is the country that exemplifies the adage, “monkey see, monkey do” and we follow fashion without shame what others do. In America, they say it in a more sophisticated way: “it’s keeping up with the Joneses.”
Fredericks is obviously not bothered that he is aping the world of monkeys in trying to rejig Rowley into being another scholar like Williams and to put Kamla in her place as a lesser academic, but in doing what he has done, he hopes that would be enough to put back the PNM in power; that he has enough power being the president of Howard to make another Williams in his image and likeness.
Fredericks knows that our roadways and water supply must be the worst in the world but he is spinning a lie to the contrary in true Rowley style obviously naively believing that if you repeat a lie enough times it becomes a truth.
Fredericks might be some kind of scholar, but he is obviously also a skull man and parents thinking of sending their children to an American University should be mindful of this shady character at Howard who sees things as a situational consequentialist where the end justifies the means, where PNM prevails even if citizens eat grass here while he splurges on caviar and champagne in his ivory tower at Howard.
The question is while he perpetuates Williams’ dreams, what is there in it for him? It has been said, there isn’t a single person who cannot be made to dance to some particular tune, what tune might Fredericks be dancing to, the sound of an ATM machine? Degrees nowadays are bought and sold over the counter like Panadol. Just saying.
L. Siddhartha Orie