By Edward Hoskins
January 22, 2006
It has been approximately just over seven months since the Trinidad and Tobago Soca Warriors graced the world football stage in the 2006 edition of the World Cup finals. The 10th of June 2006 was an important date for the country as the first time experience of being in the World Cup filled every Trinbagonian’s veins with immense, nationalistic pride. The Road to Germany experience for players, supporters and country was an event not easily forgotten, and always remembered. It is a pity, however, that the value of this experience, its significance and importance is diminished in the absence of any institutional and national framework to develop far reaching sporting programmes that will nurture football and other sporting talent.
Continue reading Capitalizing on Our Sporting Greatness
There are two additional ways we do not want, definitely do not want, to follow the U.S. prison system. 
A self-imposed media embargo seems to have overtaken Minister Colm Imbert lately on the tenuous fate of his TRRP. This prognosis has been reinforced by the negative and depressing body language that he displayed while communicating to the press at Whitehall on the Interchange. I am coming to the intuitive conclusion that Cabinet seems to have ordered secretly a pre-emptive moratorium against the TRRP, in an election year, to avoid any further disastrous fallout from another major reversal and embarrassment while the wounds inflicted by the Chatham debacle are still fresh, politically painful and electorally threatening.
I have not met Choc’late Allen, but the adulation of three media columnists, two in the Guardian, one in the Express and at www.trinicenter.com caught my attention. Immediately the above quotation came to mind. I also thought of Lincoln Myers, who fasted on the steps of the Halls of Justice twenty or so years ago, to many odd comments and assumptions. I thought of Christ, fasting in the wilderness, and of Ghandi, and the Dalai Lama, of Muslims fasting for Ramadan, and Christians who used to fast during lent, and I thought of the bloodily violent movie Children of Men that opened in theaters in the U.S. last Friday.
The Socialist Worker, in an article titled “Schools Report Shows Young People’s Lives Are Blighted by Racism” reprinted by Trinicenter.com, reports that many young people’s school lives are devoid of hope due to racism and poverty. The report, which was first published on December 16, 2006, applies to Britain and British schools. Trinidad and Tobago’s education personnel should not pass up the opportunity to read the article and learn from it.
I don’t know that Bernard Kerik or Scotland Yard officers can help us out of the crime mess that we have created and in which we are close to drowning. This cesspool is so typically Trinidadian, we cannot expect foreigners to begin to understand how we plunged into the pit. It’s true that many countries have their own crime problems that make us look relatively good. But one cannot compare the anarchy in Rio de Janeiro and elsewhere in Brazil, or high crime in parts of India or South Africa, with ours. These are countries with huge populations and land masses we can only imagine. We are a two-by-two country with a ten-by-ten crime problem that defies imagination.
Democrats must celebrate and document for posterity this defining and watershed moment in the victorious enactment of people’s power by our Chatham folk. The script of the politics of post-Chatham T&T has been rewritten by the simple, rural, ordinary God-fearing people of Chatham. Their message to us is that State arrogance, insensitivity and unilateralism have no place in the new people centred political order that they have now ushered in. No government can now afford to underestimate the will and determination of the salt of the earth to defend and conserve the integrity of their living spaces as well as their inalienable right to be consulted and heard in democratic T&T.