By Hugo Maynard
There is a particular kind of fatigue in Trinidad and Tobago that does not come from hard work. It comes from watching the same political play performed so many times that even the hecklers know the script by heart.
One side raises a scandal. The other side reaches into the attic for an older scandal. A man says, “But what about your people?” The next man fires back, “And what about yours?” Somebody digs up a photo, somebody revives an old alliance, somebody points to a handshake from ten years ago, and before long the whole country is knee-deep in a fresh round of political old-talk dressed up as accountability.
And there we are again, stuck.
Stuck not because Trinidad and Tobago lacks brains. Stuck not because the population does not understand what is happening. Stuck because too many of our public figures have perfected the art of substitution. They substitute accusation for governance. They substitute memory contests for policy. They substitute theatre for work.
That is the sickness.
It is a sickness that drains the treasury of time. And time, unlike oil or gas, is a resource we cannot drill for once it is gone. Every week spent arguing over who wore what colored shirt in 2014 is a week lost to the future. A week where a water main remains broken. A week where a child’s school goes unrepaired.
Because tell me something: when exactly are we supposed to get to the serious business of the people? When? After the next press conference? After the next bacchanal clip circulates on social media? After the next set of political supporters spend all day proving that their side was less bad than the other side?
A country cannot develop on rebuttal alone.
We have made a dangerous culture out of political tit-for-tat. Not debate, mind you. Debate is healthy. Scrutiny is necessary. Public officials must be questioned. But what we often get here is not scrutiny in service of the nation. It is selective outrage in service of party survival. That is a very different thing.
And the public knows it.
People are not stupid. They can smell when a politician is genuinely concerned about national security, corruption, crime, jobs, health care, roads, or education. They can also smell when concern is being used like cologne — sprayed on heavily for the cameras, then forgotten by evening.
That is why so much of the political noise in this country now feels hollow. Not because the issues are unimportant, but because the people raising them too often appear less interested in solving them than in weaponising them.
Every controversy becomes a political football. Every revelation becomes an opportunity to score points. Every moral stand comes with an asterisk. And every side seems to believe that the sins of yesterday are a full defence against the failures of today.
They are not.
The fact that one set of politicians may have done something questionable in the past does not excuse another set from scrutiny in the present. And the fact that the other side has its own long inventory of disgrace does not magically transform today’s nonsense into statesmanship.
Wrong does not become right because your opponent did it too. Foolishness does not become wisdom because it is shared equally across the aisle.
Yet this is the dead end we keep returning to: not who can govern best, but who can dig deepest into the cemetery of old embarrassment.
How far can a nation go like that?
Can potholes be patched with press releases? Can crime be reduced by historical reminders? Can hospitals be repaired with old campaign footage? Can the cost of living come down because one politician unearthed a dusty scandal from another administration? Can a flooding river be stopped by a viral WhatsApp voice note?
Of course not.
Ordinary people are trying to survive
And that is why so many citizens are disgusted now. Truly disgusted. Not theatrically outraged for one afternoon on Facebook. Disgusted in the soul. Because while politicians are busy cross-referencing each other’s hypocrisy, ordinary people are trying to survive a country that feels more expensive, more dangerous, more anxious, and more frayed than it should.
The mother trying to stretch groceries until month-end does not live on partisan point-scoring. The taxi driver navigating bad roads and worse fuel prices does not eat recycled scandal.
The pensioner standing in line at the pharmacy, praying the dispensary has his blood pressure medication, does not care which minister signed which memo a decade ago.
The young graduate sending out CV after CV does not build a future from hearing who limed with whom, who knew whom, who financed whom, or who posed beside whom in some grainy political memory from another season.
The people need work done.
That is the phrase our politics keeps dodging: work done.
Not noise made. Not licks passed. Not clever lines delivered at a microphone. Work done.
If a minister is unfit, deal with it properly. If there is evidence of wrongdoing, present it properly. If standards are to exist, let them exist consistently. And if politicians want to speak about integrity, they should do so with enough humility to understand that the public has a memory too. Not just of opponents’ failures, but of theirs.
That is the mirror some of them refuse to look into.
Because the truth is, many of our politicians only love the past when it is useful. They invoke history not to learn from it, but to hide behind it. The past becomes a shield, a distraction, a convenient smokescreen. And while they are polishing that old shield, the country keeps taking fresh blows.
We call it the ‘same old mas’ for a reason. But in Carnival, at least the masquerader eventually takes off the costume and goes back to work on Ash Wednesday. In our politics, Ash Wednesday never seems to arrive. The masks stay on. The performance never ends. The music just loops.
We cannot build a future if every argument is a return ticket to yesterday.
At some point, a mature political culture must decide that accountability is not a game of ping-pong. It cannot always be, “your man did this,” “well your woman did that,” “yes but your party started it,” “yes but yours perfected it.”. “Is we time now” That is not leadership. That is schoolyard quarrelling with government stationery.
And it is beneath the needs of the nation.
Trinidad and Tobago deserves better than an endless relay race of blame. We deserve leaders who understand that public office is not a licence to perform indignation while avoiding delivery. We deserve a politics that is less obsessed with revenge and more committed to results. We deserve fewer mirrors held up to the past and more windows opened onto the future.
Because if all we ever do is argue about who was worse, we will never get around to becoming better.
