Reading government documents can be dangerous to your health, I have discovered.

Over the past covid and post-covid months, like most people, as I age, I have had a few health problems - cataracts, aching ligaments where they attach to new metal joints, sudden and unexpected cessation of functions that I used to take for granted, that kind of thing.

Like everyone else who is unaccustomed to not being able to do stuff, I check with my GP, who is so honest he has been known to say: "I just do not know what is wrong with you.'

That is why I go to him. He doesn't just prescribe some expensive placebo. Honesty in medicine, as in law and politics, is so rare these days, you must cherish it when you find it.

Usually, I know when something is physically wrong with me it is because there is something spiritually wrong. Happens every time.

So when he looks at me, puzzled, and asks if I am under some kind of stress, I have learned to listen not just with my ears, but with my heart. And the more serious the stress, the more serious the physical reactions. I suppose everyone knows this; it just took me years to figure it out.

In the meantime I have had eight different kinds of surgery including heart bypass, kidney, cataract, and all the other usual ones, until I made the connection (I can be very slow, sometimes) that spiritual and emotional disruptions are what my body understands as stress and goes on to react to.

So when I read the annual Draft Estimates of Recurrent Expenditure for the upcoming year, in this case 2023, I have to take precautions. Yoga, meditation, deep breathing, hot chocolate, whatever works.

Over the last decade, for example, there have been several rather large loans obtained by our Cabinet ministers for the reorganisation of our water and sewerage system. Reading a recent headline about a US$80 million loan from the Inter-American Bank (IDB) to help 'transform" the Water and Sewerage Authority (WASA), I had a memory throwback.

In the first paragraph, I note that the Trinidad and Tobago Government has approved US$315 million for a line of credit to invest in the water and wastewater sector. Over TT$2 billion.

But as far as I remember, a similar loan was made decades ago, and, as in the present, it was done with no procurement-protection legislative oversight.

Does this mean the lack of implementation of the previous IDB loan has been 'forgiven?' That the non-implementation of promises has been cancelled? The exemption of government projects from corrupt practices or any other mismanagement or oversight in the recent draft Procurement Act, which has still not been promulgated, as inadequate as it was, says something about the overall national concern about the cost of mismanagement - and not just in relation to Vincent Nelson.

There is no need for me to go into details, because you can Google them if you really need to know the dollars and cents, or read the coverage of the budget in the press.

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