PETER O'CONNOR Sunday, March 21 2010

Has Prime Minister Patrick Manning been given some sort of prophecy into what is written about the local construction industry in the Uff Report?

Here is a man who has severely criticised all and sundry for condemning Calder Hart and Udecott based upon evidence given at the Uff Commission of Inquiry. He said we are wrong not to wait, as he is doing, for the publication of the report, so we can see how the commission interpreted all that evidence.

So, I am trying to remember, without re-reading all the testimonies, what was the incriminating evidence regarding the local construction industry in general. We all remember, that when Manning was finally forced to announce an inquiry into Udecott, he included the construction industry — carte blanche — in the terms of reference.

Professor Uff brought in a specialist to look at certain construction-relate issues at Tarouba and at Cleaver Heights. Do you remember what he reported? Nothing of any consequence at Cleaver Heights. He was dismissed by Government and has apparently still not been paid in full.

So blindly convinced, or so advised by the prophetess, that evil lurked at Cleaver Heights, was the Government, that they fired the head of the HDC, who also had found no evil, and then hired famous corruption-buster Robert Lindquist to expose the evils at Cleaver Heights. But Lindquist’s Report remains a secret, although it was handed in to the “Big C” Christian Minister “long time”.

Do you believe that the hidden Linquist Report into Cleaver Heights contains the ammunition which is needed to fight this Declaration of War (virtual or otherwise) against the industry which built most of Trinidad and Tobago? If that was so, we would have seen the report already, for this government is now becoming desperate. Everything they tried to do, first to embarrass Rowley, then to defend Hart and Udecott, and then to search for ghosts at Cleaver Heights instead of in URP, has backfired on them. The re-declaration of war on the construction industry (the first declaration was when Manning announced the inquiry into Udecott), was required because, to Manning’s horror, they could not torpedo the Uff Inquiry.

So, now, knowing that Lindquist found nothing wrong with the local construction industry, and being aware that Uff will report no shocking and incriminating revelations outside of Udecott, the Government is training its guns away from the Uff Report, and inventing a “war” against an important segment of the business community. That they could make this declaration, knowing full well that neither Lindquist nor Uff will support their charges, indicates, to me at least, that neither the Uff nor Lindquist Reports will ever see the light of exposure. These reports will “need to be sent to the Attorney General”, will need to be “further and confidentially reviewed by forensic audit” — after all, have we not called for a forensic audit? — and will “have to remain confidential to protect the innocent”, until, just like the “fully transparent” Inquiry into the collapse of the Caroni Bridge, we have all forgotten about Uff and Udecott, while NAPA, the IFC and Tarouba become ghost structures which look like the Pan Trinbago headquarters at Macoya.

And some will take this “war” to the street meetings where they will have URP and CEPEP bussed in to jump and wine as they flail the air with warlike rhetoric.

They will condemn the local industry which employs all the TT carpenters, masons, labourers, electricians, plumbers and painters, and which purchases the products and services made here in TT by TT manufacturers employing all of you. And they will praise the Chinese and Malays who come here to take your jobs, even as sweepers of pavements, while you are on the breadline. And you, ladies and gentlemen of the construction industry will become —many of you already are — the casualties of the Chinese Invasion, invited here to fight Manning’s War. Collateral damage?

And the fires of war are being stoked by little J’ouvert imps, yapping and screeching as they work out their own personal vendettas, bitter over their own failed building enterprises, which crashed like collapsed retaining walls, and upon whom judgment has already been passed — but not yet extracted.

War is Hell, yes — and if there really was a true Prophetess, she would have told them all long ago, they have already lost. It is Manning’s soldiers who will fall.