The political Satan now finding work for the idle hands of Works Minister Jack Warner will be duly revealed to have been invoked by Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar, herself falling foul of the law of unintended consequences. It had always looked like prudent political good sense to keep the ever-multitasking Mr Warner busily in the traces, and exercised toward some mutually desirable goals.

Suddenly triumphalist, however, Mrs Persad-Bissessar has assumed an expansionary mode in grappling challenges of her random choosing. To her omnibus prime ministerial portfolio, she added oversight of the multi-billion-dollar highway to Point Fortin. This, her administration's showcase project, might have otherwise defined and advertised the can-do capacity of Works and Infrastructure Minister Warner.

Now, the Prime Minister is committing time personally to execute "the most extensive and ambitious infrastructure project ever undertaken in T&T". That's how the 50-kilometre, $7.2 billion big dig had been described in a May 2011 tabloid publication. The cover showed the then minister of works and transport, wearing vicuna suit, paisley tie, gold bracelet and a smile to go with the upraised thumb. "Delivered", said the headline.

If and when the highway is finally "delivered", the Warner name could well appear as only a footnote in the official annals of its development. That's the extent of how the world turned over nine months. The Prime Minister severed Transport from his original portfolio, but left him with responsibilities for road works in progress, or in planning.

But then, the Prime Minister also arrested the moving arm of his road-fixing function, the Programme for Upgrading Road Efficiency. A faculty inherited from the Manning-Imbert administration, "PURE delivered dozens of rehabilitation and enhancement projects, spanning from east to central, to south and north Trinidad", the publication reported.

"The country is falling apart infrastructurally," said the minister with title accountability for fixing not just roads. But roads are the most problematic part.

Following weather episodes around Mundo Nuevo late last year, he cited the worst landslips anywhere. These occasioned service failures in bus transport, trucks delivering water and trucks collecting garbage.

Without PURE, he's "hamstrung", the minister said. PURE had been frozen following the Prime Minister's urgent demand for an audit of the unit's accounts.

PURE remains disabled. For once, the can-do minister can't. Nor can he keep properly quiet about it. "I am trying to see in what ways I can give the people some hope, but my ability to do so is running out," he said last month.

His pain, then, is the people's pain, and vice versa: that's the pat message being communicated in his name. So much had he gained the image of the national go-to guy for road fixing that, often when banging and swerving the aging Honda Civic along the Old St Joseph "Back" Road, I too have prayed, "Lord put a hand", with Jack Warner in mind.

A version of political hell marks the result of the infrastructure god that failed. As "Fix We Road" placards showed, and with barricades burning along Penal Rock Road, irreverent ole-mas protest projected itself, in Ms Persad-Bissessar's constituency, as no respecter of persons.

"The residents were incensed by the dismissive attitude of our PM who is our representative," said a spokesperson, articulating with unusual care into media microphones. "We need to be taken seriously."

He might well have been speaking for minister Warner who had made a feeling-your-pain visit to the protesters. He was received as a man who has been trying his best, whose word could be trusted, more than that of those whose names and designations didn't need to be called.

If he sometimes appears friendless, that's never among people who see him as the single reliable prospect for removing fallen rock from a country road, restoring a collapsed roadway, or for filling potholes everywhere. Somebody has tirelessly to take the pressure, to appear to listen and to respond tangibly to the lamentations. 

He has performed this role as the all-purpose, early-rising, central-government Somebody, who at least gestures reassuringly. This unscripted role at least potentially puts in the shade that of others in the cast. The public celebration (in opinion polling; in election pluralities) stops at the door of the Cabinet, where he is received as a minister like any other.

Well, not exactly. In January 2011, the Prime Minister introduced him to the media as "my right-hand man". Quickly, she restated: she meant the man who sits at her immediate right in the parliamentary front bench.

The world turned and turned. Before the T&T portfolio cut-up, the last people raising a battleaxe in anger against Mr Warner had been the FIFA honchos. He retreated, with a threat to come back again surfing the crest of a "tsunami".

For now, the wily world football fixer has earned a draw. Meanwhile, his new-found foes in Zurich, and long-aggrieved first world media, continue to breathe fire in the direction he was last seen.  

With more time on his hands and less to do, Mr Warner holds rehearsals, on T&T's politically unprotected shores, for his international "tsunami". His now-deferred death penalty petition, hoisting the Prime Minister on her own petard, will be only the first such project.