By Raffique Shah
February 22, 2025

Now more than ever, I am convinced that this society is so steeped in corrupt practices that no one can claim to not know what has been happening for 50-60, whatever, years. So confident am I in laying this charge of universal theft, banditry, if my editors will only agree, I shall pronounce that in this jurisdiction, everyone is presumed guilty unless or until he can prove innocence.

I know I risk the establishment coming after my Parkinson’s-ridden frame, when those who have the powers to so do deem it necessary to lock up my old self. But at this stage in my life, or what is left of it, I couldn’t be bothered. The truth has always been there staring us in the face, kicking us in our behinds, suffocating us in manure.

Stark reality is that we do not wish to see ourselves in the mirror every day, hundreds of times a day, committing felonies. Felonies that are committed casually day to day almost nonchalantly. I was struck by a seismic boulder, a blow that carried an overdose of reality that ought to have driven me to shame. But I felt nothing. I had opted to remain silent for yet another time in my near-80 years on earth.

As evil people plundered the public purse, their greedy, grubby hands soiled everything they touched around them. Was it any surprise that these matters that were listed in courts across the country would stay submerged even as many youths of the nation are jailed or shot dead for crimes such as robberies, home invasions, and murders were dispatched at a pace that better suited our values.

If we dare ask why, matters such as “brand thievery”, syphoning huge sums of money intended for public works ended up in the bank accounts of persons who are no better than the gun-toting bandits, who make our lives miserable every day, we’d be told the wheels of justice turn very slowly. They do indeed.

In Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, he dug his way out of the island prison to freedom by removing hundreds of tonnes of dirt using a spoon. If I didn’t know the count would eventually free himself and execute unconventional justice against those who put him in the dungeon, I would steups and mutter two to three cuss words.

The overlords of the system shoot us mortals with bullets of excreta, never allowing us the freedom to criticise, far less the right to ridicule them for making a mockery of justice.

There are cases where men and women who formed the government from as far back as when the Piarco airport project was undertaken at the turn of the century…in America, several of these bandits have been jailed, fined, had their properties confiscated and served time.

In T&T their accomplices enjoy the luxury of riding into the sunsets, never having justice delivered. Sure, some of them from that 2001 multi-million-dollar caper have died but other wretches smoke themselves to sleep with the best ganja money can buy. So slick were these thieves that they acquired property in “foreign” using their ill-begotten loot.

Between the Piarco airport racket (around year 2000) and the ensuing governments that looted the Treasury almost at will, not one person has been jailed for anything. No one has even been fined, such is the bureaucracy of the justice system. Indeed to its discredit, these bandits-on-high take a perverse delight in rubbing our faces in their mess.

Worse than that, they used the legal architecture of antiquity that they cleverly strapped to our laws that ridiculously allow them to appeal judgments and orders on a sentence-by-sentence basis that threads into the sublime. Can you believe this? These thieves, by filing challenges word after word against laws that they would have inserted into our system, take almost every sentence challenging them to as high as the Privy Council.

The good lords then send them back to the High Court in Trinidad where round and round, and again and again, they use monies looted from us to buy more time, wining in our faces. And, we, the people, laugh and jump and wine with them, especially at Carnival time, which proves my theory that we are as guilty as they are.

We know that several things are rotten in the State but we do not have the fortitude nor the commitment to pursue radical changes in the judicature. We citizens have become part of the problem of delayed justice. That is the biggest stumbling block when dealing with crime. For as long as we remain cowards we shall suffer needlessly at the hands of every white-collar criminal you can think of.