By Gail Alexander
September 8, 2015 – guardian.co.tt
The People’s National Movement’s fourth leader, Dr Keith Rowley, now Prime Minister-elect, will be T&T’s second Tobago-born Prime Minister following yesterday’s 2015 general election victory.
Rowley follows Tobago-born late Prime Minister Arthur NR Robinson into history in this regard.
Continue reading T&T starts new era under PNM
By Raffique Shah
February 28, 2015
A political volcano has erupted with full force, spewing rocks, ash, lava and fetid gases across Trinidad and Tobago’s landscape. But even as the explosion demolishes structures and changes the electoral topography, the political seismologists and volcanologists, seemingly in stupor, pretend that all is well.
Continue reading Political volcano erupts
By Stephen Kangal
November 11, 2013
Being a classic marginal seat, Monday’s St. Joseph Constituency (SJC) bye-election results have encapsulated and mirrored the psycho-political underpinnings of the changing electoral dynamics as well as of the traditional ethnic moorings impacting on and progressively shaping the national political/electoral psyche- a microcosm of the macrocosm.
Continue reading St Joseph Embodied the National Electoral Psyche
By Raffique Shah
November 10, 2013
Many readers scoffed at my suggestion in last week’s column that a rapprochement between UNC/COP and the ILP was a strong possibility in the run-up to the next general elections, due no later than August 2015. I imagine diehard supporters on both sides of the divide feel deeply wounded by the abuse their leaders hurled at each other during the three campaigns conducted since Jack Warner broke with the United National Congress (UNC) and formed the Independent Liberal Party (ILP).
Continue reading Facing Elections Nightmare
By Dr. Kwame Nantambu
January 29, 2013
The most revealing end-result of the recent Tobago House of Assembly (THA) election was the salient reality that Tobagonians are different from Trinidadians. And that’s what Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar either never understood or took for granted that the reverse was true.
Continue reading Tobago Results: Afri-centric Analysis
By Raffique Shah
January 19, 2013
THE ferocity with which the two main parties, the PNM and the People’s Partnership (yes, the PP!), fought the 2013 THA election, suggests that they see this battle for an anticipated 25,000 or so votes as a life-and-death struggle. Maybe it is, although I venture to add that this prognosis applies more to the Partnership than the PNM, as I shall argue. The intensity of the campaign, the media, ground and cyberspace advertising and propaganda blitz, which must have cost at least $50 million, certainly surprised me.
Continue reading Gambling on bare Jack
By Andre Bagoo
January 13, 2013 – newsday.co.tt
RESIDENTS of the polling district of Belle Garden East/Roxborough/ Delaford, which PNM candidate Hilton Sandy hopes to win in the Tobago House of Assembly elections come January 21, appear to be split right down the middle over the question of whether his chances in the election have been hurt because of his controversial “Calcutta ship” remarks.
Continue reading District split over Sandy’s Calcutta statement
By Dr. Selwyn R. Cudjoe
June 06, 2012
A few days ago, the People’s Partnership (PP) celebrated its second year of office amidst a lot of hype and propaganda. Their esteemed leader even tried to mamaguy Orville London by calling him “a bully and cry-baby” because, in his capacity as the Secretary of the THA, he sought a meeting with Kamla Persad Bissessar, in her capacity as the Prime Minister, to talk about the affairs of his country. Under normal circumstances, London would not necessarily have wanted to meet Persad Bissessar because there is nothing intellectually attractive or physically compelling about her. But such is the dynamics of power that the Prime Minister and her cohorts could say a lot of nonsense and get away with it because they control the political purse and constitutional discourses about the nation.
Continue reading PP: Taking Loud and Saying Nothing
March 13, 2012 – newsday.co.tt
IT was in our view an amazing sight last Sunday to see ultimatums being issued to the People’s Partnership (PP) Government by one of the PP’s five member groups, the Movement for Social Justice (MSJ).
Continue reading Will MSJ walk?