The Permanent Secretary also pointed out that local plastic manufacturers will still be allowed to produce banned plastic bags provided they do not sell them locally. Read the second time, this does seem to mean that plastic bag producers will be allowed to produce to export and sell but locally will have to find ‘not knowing’ gullible people who will reckon that the Ministry will never be able to prove that they are not first-time offenders. But who will be doing the policing and charging?
Surely not the police, so it must be a new cadre of Ministry plastic bag enforcers, a really disconcerting possibility? And then the local newspaper came up with two other ‘didn’t know’ reports, the first concerning a Speaker who must have known about the Electoral Act requiring candidates to submit a return of their expenses but ‘did not know’ that Parliament is obliged to ensure that this is done. I imagine that independent candidates do comply with the provisions of the Act but that the political parties don’t. The Gazette compared this instance of not knowing with another, the recent fining of pedestrians for walking on the wrong side of the road who also claimed that they ‘did not know’. Or as with the plastic bag users, that they were merely first offenders! My problem with this story is that, I personally would now know which is the right and which the wrong side of the road? Does it have something to do with roads without pavements or roads with pavements on one side only?
