Why is your name still on it, Brian?

It's that after all these revelations via the Commission of Enquiry into UDeCOTT [Urban Development Corporation of Trinidad and Tobago Limited] and the construction sector, Trinidad & Tobago really has no choice now other than to complete the Brian Lara Stadium. Sorry to use one of those political catchphrases of elections past, but we've really gone too far to turn back now.

Whether or not the testimony of key personalities and evidence unearthed prove or disprove anything, the Tarouba facility, and indeed any of the other mega projects that are at an advanced stage of construction, cannot just be halted so simply because hundreds of millions of our dollars have already been poured into it like the tonnes of cement that form the foundation of these impressive structures that will stand tall for many years to come as haunting monuments of political vanity, extravagance and folly.

Honestly, I don't know why the country's greatest-ever cricketer hasn't asked the Prime Minister to take his name off the thing, and at the same time find out from Mr Manning - who reminded us in no uncertain terms a couple months ago that he runs the country, together with the Cabinet - what the hell is going on with the other sporting facility that bears the Brian Lara name, the one up in Cantaro right around the corner from where the left-handed batting genius was born?

Anyone involved in any decent-sized construction, renovation or even landscaping project knows very well what I'm talking about. You start off all hot and sweaty and enthusiastic, and then feel your enthusiasm gradually draining away, only to be replaced by an almost debilitating sense of frustration as one issue after another starts to turn your dream into a nightmare.

If it isn't a smart-man contractor, it's workers stealing materials that your hard-earned money has already bought and will have to buy again. Then there might be some technical issue with the project and you're forced into a compromise that kills the spirit of the exercise. And let's not forget the small matter of not being able to get some specific item critical to the design concept even though the supplier promised it would be in stock, so you went ahead with what you had planned only to be let down in the end with a halfway sincere "sorry".

In some form or fashion, so many of us have been there. Trust me, I have the evidence in my yard staring back at me every striking day.

You want to stop the whole thing right there and tell everybody to get the hell out of your place. But you know, and more importantly they know, that the project has to be completed, if only because it's impractical, to say nothing of being fundamentally unsafe, to leave that gaping hole in the living-room wall, despite offering a wonderful vista of the distant hills and providing excellent ventilation.

So a sort of helplessness takes over, a depressing realisation that however well-intended or however ill-advised the project was, to abandon it completely as just a costly bad idea makes even worse economic sense.

I mean, really, what else can you do? A process of construction to the extent of the Brian Lara Stadium cannot be reversed. You might be able to trim some things here and there and not go the whole grandiose limit with it, especially as the economic downturn starts to bite very, very hard.

But somewhere down the line there will be a grand opening and lots of mellifluous speeches, some drawing on religious scripture seeing as how we're such a praying country, all designed to make us feel guilty or even unpatriotic for daring to challenge an undertaking designed to give the talented youth of today and those of many generations to come the chance to scale the pinnacle of achievement that their God-given talent deserves.

Okay, so our hands are essentially tied and we just have to keep throwing more and more money behind it or risk having a latter-day Caroni Racing Complex on a much grander scale mocking us with all its rusting steel beams and dry-rotting plastic seats (and that's before nature's greenery overwhelms it) on the journey to and from San Fernando via the Solomon Hochoy Highway.

All of this is even before we question whether the facility will actually be completed as originally intended, incorporating a High-Performance Centre with such state-of-the-art facilities and equipment as to allow our best and brightest in the sporting world to be the best they can be without having to enrol at some university up north.

Surely the master plan, even the scaled-down version, has taken into consideration an international standard cricket stadium in a country that already has one.

Unless the intention is to go into direct competition with the Queen's Park Oval and therefore have the Port of Spain venue downgraded in preference for the one that bears the champion batsman's name, it is difficult to see how both can be sustained at a time when each West Indian territory is being assigned less and not more cricket, especially after all of the new construction and upgrades ahead of the 2007 World Cup.

Oh yes, this one was supposed to be ready more than two years ago for the global event, or so we were confidently and even dismissively told. Why is your name still on it, Brian?