The other Morgan Job

   
The Greek Job and the Lesser Job

Contrary to what you may have heard, there are two Morgan Jobs in Parliament, and it was the lesser-known one alone who was present at last week's sitting.

One Dr Job is boisterous and talkative. He volunteers to speak in debates, a bold orator who denounces his critics and soldiers on in spite of them, drawing analogies from all over the world and from every period of history, offering copious quotations from his extensive reading in several languages, laughing out loud at his own private jokes, and attacking the Opposition at every turn for their intellectual bankruptcy and numerous other shortcomings.

The second Dr Job is the one who answers questions put to him as junior Finance Minister or, worse, Minister of Tobago affairs (Tobago is his least favourite subject).

He never opens his mouth unless obliged to do so, at which he meekly reads out his reply, stumbling over words of only a couple of syllables, where the other Dr Job would belt out a torrent of sesquipedalian verbiage.

Should he be subjected to a supplementary question to which he does not have a prepared answer, he stammers out a humble apology for not having the desired information, then slinks back into his seat as soon as he can, in the hope of escaping further notice.

That was the Morgan Job who almost brought Parliament to a halt on Friday, making such heavy weather of reading the amendments to the Provisional Collection of Taxes Order that the Opposition suggested, out of pity or exasperation, that the House adjourn until the motion had been sorted out.

He mumbled haltingly through a bewildering series of deletions and insertions, thought he'd finished and sat down, only to be told by the Speaker he had to continue.

He spoke about a non-existent committee stage; he couldn't answer the Speaker's queries; and generally made a dog's dinner of the whole business. But if this bizarre performance was a ploy to distract the Opposition, it failed abysmally.

The Provisional Collection of Taxes Order, as far as one could tell from Dr Job's painful and garbled presentation, had to do with authorizing the amnesty for taxpayers announced in the Budget speech by Finance Minister Brian Kuei Tung.

If you go by the Opposition's account, there are also two Mr. Kuei Tungs. The one we know is the genial and generous minister who came to Parliament last month to present a Budget which, if it wasn't packed with goodies, didn't contain any nasty surprises either.

The other is, to borrow one of Dr Job's words, a machiavellian schemer who never makes a move unless there's something in it for him.

After the Budget, ordinary, salaried taxpayers rejoiced quietly that they would never have to struggle with a pink form again, and that they wouldn't have to pay any penalties for the small stack of such forms still waiting to be filled out and sent in.

But according to the Opposition, the wily Finance Minister's amnesty wasn't for the benefit of those humble and arithmetically challenged folk at all, but for the convenience of those shadowy and sinister figures, the Friends of the Government.

Not content merely to loot the Treasury of millions of dollars by buying state assets cheap or submitting exorbitant bills for contracts, the FOGs add insult to injury by evading taxes on their ill-gotten gains.

And if somehow they are forced to pay up, they want to dodge the interest and penalty payments on these already astronomical sums - hence the amnesty.

The Opposition brought out its big guns, the three Diego Martin MPs, to pound the Government on this point, with Ken Valley and Colm Imbert working as warm-up men for Dr Keith Rowley.

Armed with a sheaf of leaked Cabinet notes, Mr. Valley waxed unusually warm, and scored a direct hit on the infamous bifold door. Stung by Dr Rowley's claim that taxpayers had coughed up $98, 000 for a $500 door, the Minister of Works retorted last week that there was no such door in the new airport terminal. The PNM weren't content to leave the matter there. Mr. Valley pounced on it: "They tief the door!" he crowed.

Dr Rowley found time to single out the unhappy member for Tobago East, "Mephistopheles and Cicero and their friends are all he knows," he sneered. "Ask him anything else and he doesn't know."

Dr Job had no defence, and no one came to his rescue: not Mephistopheles, Cicero, the Friends of the Government or even his own alter ego.

But Dr Rowley soon moved on, giving a tour de force that condemned the Government's handling of the Treasury, education, Tobago, the shortfall in the water supply, the desalination plant, and the airport. There's only one Dr Rowley, and he operates in a single mode: attack.

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