Must be island style `nai

For years, I’ve heard politicians and bureaucrats talk about the need to “address” this or that issue. It’s a good way to set the stage for more, well, addresses in perpetuity. What’s so great about “addressing” issues? We veer off resolving them in forthright fashion. It must be the usual Mañana Syndrome nurtured over generations.

Perhaps it’s a new vocabulary for bureaucrats and politicians and I’m just about ready to puke the next time this word is used redundantly and incoherently. Maybe it’s that Island Style `Nai. A` Saina!

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For more than three decades, we’ve been conditioned to rely, detrimentally, on everything that is government. In the process, we failed to come to grips with the central issue of what fuels government operations–healthy private sector development–whose tax contributions are disposed by politicians through appropriations.

So what’s the point? Somehow we have also built the juvenile attitude that the private sector is our enemy. Therefore, we can royally ruin their expansion or encouragement of more lasting investments via protectionist laws. Well, we woke up one morning (at least a few of us) to find out the net effect of this inadequacy: No jobs for hundreds of young Chamolinians.

Sadly, we have turned paradise into the hell-hole of our young people some of whom have started migrating to the US mainland in search of better opportunities. This, my friends, isn’t my vision of the role of leadership. And it isn’t surprising at all that most who aspire for the top two posts aren’t even wary of their royal failure in this area.

Must be Island Style `Nai!

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I really feel for well-meaning businessmen who understand the essence of “wealth and jobs creation”. In recent years, however, they have been the victims of a far more acute leper-like treatment by arrogant policymakers. I sincerely hope that this adolescency isn’t a microcosm (crystal ball) of what lies ahead.

At least there’s hope in the horizon under the tutorship of Speaker Benigno R. Fitial. He’s decided to “fly alone” transcending entrenched GOP politicians who have lost the pulse of their constituents: Ability to listen to the true sentiments of their people at the grassroots level. These people have lost their navigational abilities not that they don’t have it, but have allowed their overblown ego to turn themselves into fat and arrogant prima donnas. If this isn’t Island Style `Nai then it must be a new though self-destructing political culture.

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With the GOP gubernatorial contest turning into a crowded race, my Kayu is smiling ear-to-ear with a belly chuckle, saying “It’ll be a real slugfest!”

Said he: “Kayu, this is a smorgasbord of GOP candidates who’d be preparing plenty chasers and ice cold beer. We’d eat their food, drink their beer and tell `em go ahead an make us more promises than you can deliver!”

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Retirees and young people working for the non-garment sector of the apparel industry here have asked, “Sir, what happens to us if this industry shuts down?” I told them to talk to their politicians who have lost sight of the essence of job opportunities that permits working people in this community to bring home the bacon.

This is the working people whose future is at stake as alleged leaders exercise, to the hilt, their shallowness, if not, hollowness, of the workings of economics. What makes it worse is their obvious inability to offer substitute industries. Reality Check, anybody? Hello? Or is there a need to include, in orientation of new policy and decision makers, an intense course on Economics 101? Is Mr. Jack Sablan of NMC ready for this task? If you can’t stretch their IQs, at least you can teach them some lessons in humility. A` Saina!