Was It Right To Fire Nizam Mohammed?

Was He a Sacrificial Lamb?

He was not fired for what he did but how and where he did it.

Nobody drops their pands and take a crap in the middle of Fredrick St at noon; not even a vagrant. And you certainly would not get away with it if you was recently found pissing on yourself on the Promonard.

To be honest red flags started flying from the minute the public found out that he would be appointed as the head of the Police Service Commission. The objection; he came with a party bias because he was a long standing member of the ruling UNC party. In fact, during the party’s previous reign he was appointed Speaker of the House.

Despite all objections he was nominated. The party stood by him. Prime Minister refused ot budge on his nomination and he was eventually appointed. The opposition maintained to call for his removal with very little affect. Then the incident with the police officers occurred in Port of Spain.

Is he a racist now? IMHO, not hardly.

Remember the saying: “people who live in glass houses should not throw stones”. Or the verse in the bible when Jesus said “Let he that is not guilty cast the first stone”.

Take a look at the world from Nizam’s Mohammed’s perspective. Forget that he is a loyal UNC man or that he is a distinguished lawyer in Trinidad and Tobago. Understand the man for a minute.

He is an Indian man who worked hard to attain his stature in the society. He had reached the point where he felt that people, in fact, every police officer should know “who he was”. If they didn’t they were dumber than they looked.

So when the officers stopped him he was aghast that they did not recognize him. Afterall he was also the former Speaker of the House. They either didn’t know or didn’t care. Incidentally, both police officers were afro Trinidadians. They did not make his day.

Word on the street is that he was trying to get back at them for slighting him especially since the incident caused him so much trauma. That's just the word of people who need to add fuel to the fire.

Although a sitting Ministers and the Attorney General had voiced a similar concern about the Indo/Afro race disparity in the police service no one paid any attention to them. It would have been foolish of them to pick up that mantle.

But they had a top dog in the Police Service Association (PSC); Nizam Mohammed. He could comfortably broach the topic, or so he thought. According to him, most likely without checking, he had a “constitutional mandate” to make it right.

There is nothing wrong in making anything right.

All he wanted to do was “help his people”. Should he be labeled a racist and be vilified because he took up a just “at least to him” cause? The statistic he quoted was inaccurate but his motive was to say the least idealistic.

Here is the $65 million dollar question:

Would you try to help “your people” if you was placed in a position such as the one he had and the same conditions existed?

If you answered no, I’d say you are lying to yourself or you are just an extraordinary human being.

He must have been totally shocked when he started getting feedback from his public statements. The opposition he expected them to object but they were not in a position to do anything. What must have thrown him for a loop was the reaction of his fellow commissioners, prominant Indians "his people" and almost every Minister in the UNC party. He must have felt a tremendous sense of betrayal.

Words like racist, reckless, insensitive, splitting the society apart assaulted his consiousness. All through it he remained cocky and defiant.

Even after President Max Richards fired him, his arrogance remained evident. According to him “I did nothing wrong”.

With that, this writer totally agrees. He did nothing that any of us in Trinidad and Tobago, no matter what race you belong to, wouldn’t do.

Unfortunately, he painted the government into a corner; they had to act. It could not be ignored like the other two instances. They assumed that if they did nothing they would be viewed as supportative of his position. Doing that, they rationalized could divide the society, the worst case scenario trigger a race war in Trinidad and Tobago.

That was the unstated but outlandish hidden assumption.

He certainly should not have been appointed and all this fuss would have been avoided. But I do not agree with the reason he was fired. He did, in essence, what any of us would have done given the same circumstances.

You may not have done it exactly in the same way but you would have done something, to help our people get a better life. You would not be able to help it if you are human. Unless of course you are so blended you do not ascribe yourself to any race then you may decide to help friends, family or acquaintances. That's how we are; especially in T&T.

The funny thing about us as human beings is that we abhor ourselves. We demonstare it by loudly pointing out the same fault in other humans. It is as if by doing so others will not figure us out and our secret would stay with us forever.

Inately we are all racists by nature. Many of us have transcended the vagaries of racism but it never really leaves us. There is something about having commonality with others.

Is it not so?


Wah yuh tink?