THE EDITOR: Fifty-eight seconds: that is how long it takes to pay one's electricity bill online.

The same cannot be said for paying WASA's bill or trying to access most of government's online services.

T&TEC is an example of what is possible in TT. From their prompt responses to power failure, to billing that no longer requires someone physically reading a meter, they service over 700,000 properties throughout TT.

In TT we have competent, educated, talented, hard-working people who have been successful internationally and can elevate our nation to be among the wealthiest, most efficient, and best places to live in the world.

Instead of realising our potential we fail at some of the most basic things, water distribution and road repair among the top of the list of inefficiencies. Why, one may ask.

The answer is simple: ignorant, arrogant, uninformed, narcissistic leaders. In almost every sphere of our management, there are individuals who thrive on language that is loud and borders on obscene. They spew their message of hatred, sectarianism, xenophobia, and segregation on social media and are highlighted on the traditional media as leaders.

It seems that for one to be effective in today's world one has to be angry and loud. Even our most private of moments with our creator is now infiltrated with loud angry voices condemning us to hell if we don't find a way to fund the aspirations of the angry preacher. Poverty, pain, and more poverty are promised to those who cannot find a way to take their savings and survival money to sow seeds to enrich the life of the self-proclaimed 'man or woman of God.'

In Nelson Mandela's Park, for example, there is a water well that supplies drinking water to the population. The city proposed to place artificial turf for the benefits of the many on that location. That construction usually entails a sub-layer of filtering sand on clean soil to allow for water filtration. That kind of construction can only be positive to the groundwater. Artificial turf is now commonplace throughout the developed world in very environmentally sensitive nations.

Yet the loud voices in ignorance trounced the idea and prefer to maintain a grass that need to be chemically treated to be sustained, thus, contaminating the groundwater.

Many labour leaders fail to encourage workers to take a vaccine to save their life. One remembers a time when, a union discouraged its members from buying shares from FCB when that one activity could have drastically improved their financial position.

One must be bemused or perhaps shocked at the failure of some political leaders to encourage their members to get vaccinated, knowing that in so doing they may be saving their lives and that of their families. The failure of our leaders is our worst enemy.

Now is the time to rise together and say in our quiet, peaceful tones, we are better than that. We are an intelligent people. We do not subscribe to divisiveness and igno