Is attrition The Sportt Company’s act for problem solutions

Is attrition The SporTT Company’s act for problem solutions?

The frequency of CEO turnovers at the SporTT Company: Five CEO’s gone in six years!

Trying to find a new employee can be a challenge, especially if you are replacing another employee that performed well.

Even if you were hiring an employee for a new position, matching a prospective employee's qualifications to the activities they are expected to perform could take some time.

People Adversely Affected:
Gerard Ferreira (Businessman / Swimmer)
Ken Charles (Businessman)
Rhett Chee Ping (Businessman / Rugby)
Sebastein  Paddington (Town Planner / Swimmer)
Dudnath Ramkissoon (Petrotin Employee / Cricket)
Michael Phillip (Businessman / Cycling)
Dinanath Ramnarine (Former WIPA President / Cricket)

Do these fall-guys fit the competence level require to lead the SporTT Company?

The SporTT Company Executive Board, Ministerial Leaders, or Political plebiscite are in an unpredictable and uncontrollable, but normal, reduction of work force due to resignations, retirement and possible financial mismanagement. Plus the invocation of attrition, creates a need for investigation of the status quo.

 A brief review of the SporTT Company activities recorded in the Media:

1.    TTCB wants audit of SporTT - August 16, 2014.

2.    THE Trinidad and Tobago Cricket Board (TTCB) is calling for the Sport Company of Trinidad and Tobago to be fully audited.

3.     SporTT chided for lack of action on audit - November 2, 2016. Two years after an audit into the operations of the Sport Company of Trinidad and Tobago (SporTT) identified a number of failings within the organization, the recommendations made in the auditor general’s report have yet to be implemented in any meaningful way. 

4.    SporTT board must go now - August 6, 2014. 

5.    The next priority of acting Sport Minister Dr Rupert Griffith must be to fire the board of the Sport Company of Trinidad and Tobago.

6.     SporTT board fired - August 7, 2014 .The Cabinet yesterday fired the board of the Sport Company of Trinidad and Tobago (SporTT), which is chaired by Sebastien Paddington.

7.     Old SporTT board must account August 18, 2014 . With the board of directors of the Sport Company of Trinidad and Tobago (SporTT) dismissed, on reflection, even VS Naipaul could not think up this story.

8.     DPP to have final say in SporTT audit January 13, 2011. 

9.    SEVERAL individuals are facing the possibility of being charged with criminal offences arising out of the discovery of a $90 million discrepancy at the Sport Company of Trinidad and Tobago (SporTT), Sport Minister Anil Roberts has said. Following Cabinet's review of an interim audit report of SporTT.

10. Smith: Ministry to set tone for SporTT - December 5, 2015.

11. Minister of Sport Darryl Smith said the Ministry of Sport will set the example for the Sport Company of Trinidad and Tobago (SporTT) and national sporting organisations (NSOs) in how to conduct their affairs. 

12.Trimming the waste - November 28, 2010. Rhett Chee Ping, newly-appointed chairman of the Sports Company of Trinidad and Tobago (SporTT), said his main job is to trim the waste and professionalise the operations of the state-run company. Prior to and after the May 24 general election, the People's Partnership's spokespersons have berated.

13. 104 SporTT employees sent home - Another 35 workers remain on suspension 69 back on the job at SporTT January 10, 2011.

14. Some 69 employees of the Sport Company of Trinidad and Tobago (SporTT) who were suspended were back at work.The action came on the heels of an audit at the State-owned company. 

15. Systematic problem at Sportt Company  - The Trinidad Guardian - Jan 12, 2011. Former sports minister Gary Hunt says there exists a systematic problem at the Sports Company of T&T (SporTT) which current Sports Minister ... https://guardian.co.tt/news/.../systematic-problem-sportt-company

This Systematic problem has cancerous implications

It needs radiation to address the damaged cells:
Ferreira to Charles was because of National Election. Still under the same PNM party.
Changed from Charles to Chee Ping because of National elections different administration from PNM to the People’s Partnership Party.
The change from Chee Ping to Paddington was because Chee Ping resigned.
The change from Paddington to Ramkissoon was because the Government's People Partnership decided to change the board.
The change from Ramkissoon to Phillips was because of National Elections  from the People’s Partnership Party back to PNM.
The change form Phillips to Ramnarine was because Phillips resigned.

The protocol:

The Sportt Board reports to the Minister of Sport.
The Board is appointed by the Cabinet.
The line Ministry is the Ministry of Sport. They also report to the Ministry of Finance Investment Division.

They also fall under the Company’s Act.
The heads of the Parliamentary Joint Select Committee Senator Small asked for a probe to determine the process for the frequency of the changes within the SporTT Company. Five CEO’s Dismissed / Removed or Resigned in six years.

The oppressive question now is: Are we putting the right Leadership in place to lead the Company? 
What are the proficiencies of the Leadership? How does it match the core aptitudes of the job? 
Are there competencies for the job? 
In this context, what is the vision for the Ministry of Sports? 

What is the vision of the SporTT Company?  

Proverbs reminds us, “That a man or people without a vision will perish.”  Well if there is no vision, one can only assume there is no activated Strategic Plan. Then what is the noetic chemical element that is the gas with no smell or color, which does not react with other ideas. Plato would be dammed fooled by this continued lack of forward movement.
Without movement it would be like “the Confederate incursion into Mexico"

:

If one is assuming that there is no plan? Then your assumption is based on an assumption.
Then, how Is the  SporTT Company being managed?
The controlling question; are we putting the right leadership in place to lead the SporTT Company?
Are our Leaders leading form the Balcony or from the Center? 

Ronald Atifetz, from Harvard  University, would ask the following: Are they getting an aerial view of matters of issues in order to make inform decisions?

Is the SporTT Company in compliance with the Performance Manual issued by the Ministry of Finance Investment Division?

What about the monitoring and evaluation process?
How does the SporTT Company co-relate: economy, efficiency and effectiveness? Is good governance being practiced?

If the idea of Political Patronage looms in the conversation, there is nothing wrong with that, but put the right pegs in the right hole for the sake of pragmatism.

What about Leadership at the Management Level?

Do they have the capabilities to take Sport to unprecedented levels of international podiums?
Within the framework of the SporTT Company: Is the CEO, the Chairmen and the Minister of Sports mutually exclusive?

Where is the Draft Policy Stored? 

 Is it fundamentally based on Empirical Data? 

 Without Policy issuance, you can’t plan and implement any fruitful initiative. 
  
Within recent times, legal matters has continued to plagued the system .

There has been a preponderance of legal complaints, threats of complaints or notice of claims being served.
In several sporting disciplines namely football, gymnastics, badminton, and jump rope, you have gallivant (gad) bungling.
In cycling, swimming before the last Olympics.
The recently approved constitution of the NAAA is now being called into question and deemed unconstitutional.

What is the example they are going to set given the frequency in turnover of the leadership at the Sportt Company?

To be able to make definitive statements there is need for empirical data vis-a-vis the actual conduct of the officials as it impacts the affairs of the organization.

At any point in time, does the problem lie with the personnel selected or the political directorate whose policies - formal and informal - inform the direction of the company?

Are the officials expected to follow blindly the dictates of the directorate?  

Do the changes reflect the integrity of officials who refuse to act against their principles?

Are the changes based on the reasons proffered by those outgoing officials who presented statements?
Is all that exist is speculation?

Dr.Cliff Bertrand

Olympian

The Walcott –Bertrand Conversational Dialogue at the Pegasus!

Our last conversation at the Pegasus Hotel poolside, Kingston, Jamaica, 1993.

Sir Derek Alton Walcott, KCSL, OBE, OCC (23 January 1930 – 17 March 2017) was - a born St. Lucian - Poet and Playwright.

He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature for his Homeric Epic Poem “Omeros” (1990), which many critics view "as Walcott's major achievement.”

“For what else is there

I’m just a red nigger who love the sea

I had a sound colonial education.”

“I am the Caribbean”

He felt duty-bound to write of the wind, and the memory of wind-whipped hair in the sun, the colour of fire!

Derek Walcott stood on the shoulders of giants at the pinnacle of a pyramid. Standing on the pinnacle of the literary world higher than any Caribbean thought process was willing to conceive.

This reality just blew my mind as never before.

I have had one such stunning moment before. That is when the iconic Jamaican, Herb Mckinley left the VIP lounge at the Queens Park Savannah, in Port of Spain, Trinidad, to shake my hands for winning the 400 meters West Indies championship in record time.

I, for once more, would stand side by side, and be greeted by such a symbolic “Eiffel-like tower” in the annals of literary history.

Yet he, meek and mild, as humble as the biblical lamb, he said:

 “Cliff, I thank you and Phoebe for coming!”

 “We celebrate the return of the UWI Graduates, Mona, Jamaica 1993.”

 The conversation sparked off what was to follow, gladdened by an emotional state of euphoria concerning when he got the news?

From his lounge chair at the Pegasus Hotel poolside there was brief silence.

Then, suddenly, a powerful, emotional reaction, as if the whole Caribbean had been vindicated from the chains of slavery.

The documentation, not just thrilled, but his work was at last authenticated by the ultimate global authority of the laureates.

Derek Walcott with ‘the gift of gab’ -

 “When the call came from Stockholm at six o’clock one morning in October, I had just returned to my Boston apartment from my daughter Lizzie’s wedding in Trinidad.”

“On the phone was a voice from Sweden, telling me I won the Nobel Prize for Literature and that I should not leak the news to anyone before one o’clock in Stockholm.”

However, within five minutes I was on the phone with my wife Margaret in Trinidad. She said “Stop making jokes!” 

 

Derek Walcott “I am not joking! I am more serious than a heart attack”, he reiterated.

In the Caribbean, the news trickled out that day.

The Antiguan novelist - Jamaica Kincaid - from her home in Vermont put it in stereotypically blunt terms:

 “I thought we were just part of the riffraff of the British Empire until I read this man and thought: Oh yes, that is me. That is us. It’s a great day to be a West Indian.”

Popular opinion echoed the thought that the 1992 prize would go to Heaney or Naipaul. They were the morning line favorites.

However, the Magisterial Citation from the Swedish Academy of Letters. spoke differently – “Walcott! In him, West Indian culture has found its great poet.”

It praised Walcott’s “historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment”, “his melodious and sensitive style” was second to none.

In the meantime, the news as I recalled came over New York’s NBC.

 I said to my wife Phoebe, a fervent student of Literature; “Derek won the literature prize, the Nobel prize!”

 “Yuh got to be kidding me! Are yuh sure!”

“Currently I am doing ‘Dream on Monkey Mountain’ with my class. I know the man!”

 My response: “I partied with him in Cascade and Diego Martin! He teaches in Boston!”

“Send him a congratulations cable c/o English Department, Boston University!”

The next thing I knew was that UWI was going to Honor him. Walcott sent us an invitation to “Return of the Graduates UWI, Mona, Jamaica, 1993.

My wife and I joined his party at the Pegasus hotel in Kingston. We met Derek at the hotel poolside that afternoon for Brunch.

The reconnection of lost time between two friends was the passion of the moment.

We spoke about Trinidad and St Lucia with such vivid recollection - as engraved in one of his poems:

“I’m just a Red Nigger who love the sea. I had a sound Colonial Education.”

He looked forward to a qualifying conversational engagement about my countryside experience.

He recognized my University of Columba Graduation gown. Hence my academic status proclamation was clear and distinguishable.

As for love of the sea, I simply decreed to be a small country village boy.

Walcott was eager to take note of my story and skillfully shifted the concentration from him to me.

I, in one form or another, treasure my Las Lomas #3 nurturing. Where I unioned with nature under the covers of Cocoa, Coffee, Immortal Trees, and Rice Lagoons.

I listened to the Sempe, Yellow Tail. Doves, Pico Platt, Male Cobo, Red Neck King Cobo, Parrots and Paraquit, at dawn and dust.

I tracked the Agouti, the Lapp, the Tatoo, the Deer and the Iguanas by day, the Possum and Caymans at night.

I fished the Waubeen, Coscarob, Teta, Sardine and Cascadura by diurnal.

The shine of the fig leaves in the moonlight after the rainfall scared me! The Tania leaves umbrellad me in the rain.

The Yam, Cushcush, Dasheen, Edoes, and Fig, sustained my hunger.

The Mangoes, Cocorite, Pomerac, Cerrette seed, Yellow Plums, Cashew, Poirdoux, Pomceterre, and Balata to mention delicacies.

This my native Bushman Education. “I could smell ah deer and ah snake like a blood-hound on the harrow-chase.”

Even as I observed the water grass dewdrops at dawn, I yearned to run like a deer, as I embraced the fragrance from the hot pitch under my feet during the midday sun after ah Passing-Cloud.

At dust the croaking frogs tuck me in to enjoy the ‘honey-dew of slumber’ on my grandmother’s dress. And a razor-grass pillow on the ‘hard-box factory-wood flooring’ welcomed me.

Derek provoked his point as he lived his point.

A point man who opened up the sea for those who want to travel that route with the love of the islands as his passion unfolded.

He crystallized ‘the midsummer sea, the hot pitch, this grass, these shacks that made me jungle, and razor grass shimmering by the roadside, the edge of art.’

 The persona of a country boy in the reality of his union and blend with nature - he knows the woodlice are humming in the sacred wood, nothing can burn them out, and they are in the blood.

The dwelling place of his soul.

He described his own preparation partly in terms of learning to see and love the island where he was born:

I had my country village association.

Walcott, to capture ‘the feel of the island, bow, gunwales and stern as jealously as the fisherman knew his boat.’

‘That education would mean nothing unless life were made so real that it stank.’

He spoke of the transformation of The Little Carib Theatre Workshop, to the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, founded in 1959.

His group met on Friday evenings to do improvisations and scenes from plays just imagined.

I was a witness to this narrative, having lived in Trinidad, and frequented his home in Cascade and Diego Martin, and often supported his theatre readings as time permitted.

Walcott had an important gathering of smart people on his team.

He had the likes of the established Errol John and Errol Hill. The rest is the recorded history of the pathway to the kingdom of laureates.

He was such a man I chose to call friend!

He offered me a copy of his ‘OMEROS’. I humbly asked that he gifted it to my daughter Lisa.

She is the future and can bear witness to a man I called friend. Walcott signed the book with Lisa in mind!

“What else is there

but books, books and the sea.”

The four New Testament Evangelists (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) – as ordinary-size people sat on their shoulders; Walcott, though smaller, inspired by William Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton, ‘saw more’ than other eyes could see in the field of literature from their shoulders.

‘Forty years gone, in my island childhood, I felt that the gift of poetry had made me one of the chosen’, a biblical implication of his spirit.

The phrase also appears in the works of the Jewish Tosaphist Isaiah di Trani (c. 1180 – c. 1250):

 ‘Should Joshua the son of Nun endorse a mistaken position?’

‘I do not hesitate to express my opinion, regarding such matters in accordance with the modicum of intelligence allotted to me. I am the Caribbean!’

‘I was never arrogant claiming, My Wisdom served me well.

Instead I applied to myself the parable of the philosophers.

For I heard the following from the philosophers,

The wisest of the philosophers asked: ‘We admit that our predecessors were wiser than we.’

At the same time we criticize their comments, often rejecting them and claiming that the truth rests with us.’

How is this possible?

I, Cliff, bear witness to an unrestricted lesson on philosophy from my friend the Laureate!

Walcott was in the moment!

He was destined to receive an honorarium from the University of the West Indies, Mona , Jamaica, later on that evening .

Anxiety mounted, as I observed Walcott’s then argument with butterflies fluttering inside me. I was elated by his rap with an ‘Oxford, Bostonian, Caribbean accent’, I call “Walcottian ‘in dialogue.’

We continued the conversation with an engaging aire of camaraderie.

I looked up at the table and experienced a feeling of extraordinary power.

There sat six people in the circle, they had no place to go. They were a captive audience for the next several minutes.

There was nothing shy about Walcott’s poetic voice.

It demanded to be heard, in all its sensuous immediacy, philosophical, historical, bibliographical references and the biblical complexity of his parabolic nourishment.

The wise philosopher responded:

"Who sees further a dwarf or a giant? Surely a giant for his eyes are situated at a higher level than those of the dwarf.

But if the dwarf is placed on the shoulders of the giant who sees further?

This is why I said my Daughter Lisa is the future!

 So too, my daughter, like the dwarfs astride the shoulders of her Mother and Father, her giants.

She has mastered our wisdom and moved beyond it. Due to our wisdom she has grown wise and is able to express all that we taught, but not because she is greater than we are, but because, we her parents, remain in her eyes, worthy of emulation!

A teacher by trade!

I realized the opportunity to persuade the table that my cause was just, my argument sound!

I felt capable of capturing the audience sympathetic attention.

I remained alert to the opportunities to use a question to advance a key point of my narrative.

 

Walcott’s family is of English, Dutch and African descent, reflecting the complex colonial history of the island that he explores in his poetry.

But my family tree shows that.

I am of Spanish, French Creole and African descent, a mixture of our Colonial birthright.

I appreciate Walcott’s oral arguments, which seldom accommodates set speeches. His argument is a conversation, a discussion between knowledgeable communities and his ‘inward hunger’, having done his homework on a “Hot Bench”.

Walcott felt the Colonial burden: He saw the fragmentation of Caribbean identity.

He envisioned the role of the poet in a post-colonial Era. He then developed the persona of ‘an elated, exuberant poet madly in love with English’. He became strongly influenced by modernist poets as T.S.Eliot and Ezra Pound.

Yet the beauty of the islands was his perpetual nostalgia. ‘I am the Caribbean!’

Dr.Cliff Bertrand

Former NYC ,Board of Education ,School Administrator