Category Archives: Tobago

Elections, General T&T, PNM, Politics, THA, UNC

Election bell ringing

By Raffique Shah
March 12, 2024

Raffique ShahOnly a fool, a fanatical partisan politician, or an academic seeking to enter the profession of predicting election results would venture to predict the results of the next Trinidad and Tobago general election, due sometime over the next year or so. I have watched with interest how incumbent prime minister Dr Keith Rowley gave his first signal, when at one of his party’s meetings last week he spent some minutes on the topic and declared the election will be “the most serious you have ever taken part in”. I found that statement intriguing: every election is important.
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Elections, General T&T, PNM, Politics, THA, Tobago

Manufacturing Dictators

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By Raffique Shah
March 06, 2023

Raffique ShahThe dizzying pace at which politicians who have promoted themselves as contenders for top positions in government, see things fall apart around them, is an ominous collapse of a political system that seems to have been built to secure the ruling elites. The relics of a post-colonial era that guaranteed the grandchildren of the favoured ones is being battered every-which-way leaving many of them who now hold strategic positions in governments, unsure of their future, and quite likely afraid of what tomorrow may bring.
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General T&T, Politics, THA, Tobago

Duke of democracy or demagoguery?

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By Raffique Shah
December 19, 2022

Raffique ShahI shall not be at all surprised if elementary Watson, the Duke of Roxborough, Tobago, fulfils his ambition to become the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago by 2025, or maybe before the due year for the next general election, should he use unconventional means to pursue power.

Duke, who has made no secret of his medium-term objective, has established offices of his Progressive Democratic Patriots party in Trinidad, even as he moves to force yet another election for the Tobago House of Assembly, which he expects will result in him being proclaimed King of Tobago.
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Elections, General T&T, PNM, Politics, THA, Tobago

An unforgiving electorate

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By Raffique Shah
August 08, 2022

Raffique ShahContinuing where I ended last Sunday, by the turn of the millennium and the century, the Opposition United National Congress had positioned itself to capitalise on the vulnerabilities of the People’s National Movement, which had been weakened by the mass movement of 1970 (Black Power) that was driven largely by the children and grandchildren of the PNM.
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General T&T, PDP, PNM, Politics, THA, Tobago

COLONIAL TRAPPINGS

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By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
January 17, 2022

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeIn June 2001, the Japanese Black Studies Association invited me to deliver an address, “Identity and Caribbean Literature”, at Nara Women’s College, Nara, Japan (see trinicenter.com, June 24, 2001). Before I delivered my address, my host asked me to meet the president of her college, to which I agreed. I had stopped wearing ties because I considered it a useless trapping (literally) of colonialism. However, my host politely reminded me I had to wear a tie if I was going to see her president.
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Elections, General T&T, PDP, PNM, Politics, THA, Tobago

Move Satan move

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By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
January 04, 2022

“You may know the man by the conversation he keeps.”

—Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeOur Prime Minister, Dr Keith Rowley, is reputed to have said to US President Joe Biden that the salient factor in our democracy is his capacity to listen to the opinions of his people. I hope he meant that he listened not only to what they say loudly and directly, but also to what isn’t said aloud but is equally as pertinent.

This is important: the Prime Minister’s success in office over the next four years depends upon his listening not only to what is said directly, but also to what is communicated silently.
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General T&T, PDP, People's Partnership, PNM, THA, Tobago

We happy and we sad

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By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
December 13, 2021

“God don’t sleep! We want change. The ghetto youth, the old, the young, everybody come out because we want change and if Farley and the PDP do stupidness, we voting them out, too.”

—Lisa Mulcare, Express

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeOn August 2, 2020, prior to the general election in T&T, in a column entitled “Why I support UNC this time around”, I wrote: “Although PNM began as a movement that was cognisant of the needs of the under-class Indians and Africans alike—over the years it has come to take the support of black people for granted. One only has to look at the conditions under which many black people in depressed communities live to recognise that they have not been the recipients of PNM’s loving and tender care.”
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Elections, PDP, PNM, Politics, THA, Tobago

One-half apology to Farley

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By Raffique Shah
December 13, 2021

Raffique ShahOkay, I am prepared to give the new governor of Tobago one-half an apology for writing last week that he is a fool. “Be nice to the young man, nah… he trying to put together an energetic team to first salvage, then turn around the island’s economy…”

I gather as much, I responded, listening to him speak… But you and I know talk is cheap and promises even cheaper… until we see hard evidence of his performance, I shall stick with the half-apology.
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PNM, THA, Tobago

Grounds for the Resignation of PM Rowley

By Stephen Kangal, Caroni
December 12, 2021

Stephen KangalThe landslide vote of 15,000 plus in the 14-1 melt-down that the PDP amassed in Monday’s historic THA Elections is an unmistakably overriding vote of no confidence in Prime Minister Rowley.

He was the chief protagonist in the Tobago campaign as well as the architect of the aborted Autonomy Bills that incited the wrath of Tobagonians by non-passage. These Bills were woefully short in details on what Tobago demanded as autonomy for their island Government.
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Elections, General T&T, PDP, PNM, Politics, THA, Tobago

The Farley factor

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By Paolo Kernahan
December 09, 2021 – newsday.co.tt

Farley AugustineTHE PNM’S rout at the hands of the fledgling People’s Democratic Patriots (PDP) in Monday’s THA elections came as quite a shock to many. The incumbent went from a six-six tie in the January poll to a 14-one annihilation.

On paper, this shouldn’t have happened. The THA was under the thrall of the PNM for more than two decades. The party prosecuted a blitzkrieg advertising campaign affording it near-ubiquity across the media. The Prime Minister is Tobagonian and freely lent his incandescent fear and fervour to the campaign.
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