Category Archives: Politics

General T&T, Politics

T&T at 59: Jean or Dinah?

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By Raffique Shah
August 30, 2021

Raffique ShahIf I were asked to put a human face to a new portrait of Trinidad and Tobago at age 59, I would sketch a decrepit Jean or Dinah, aged beyond her actual years, scowling and regretting her wasted years, waiting to die at the feet of an ungrateful people.

I am not happy conjuring such a sorry image of my native land at a point in its history when it should be bubbling with life, oozing confidence and full of energy befitting a nation that has had a good run, whatever obstacles it may have encountered after it became an independent nation on August 31, 1962.
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Africa, General T&T, PNM, Politics, Race and Identity, Racism Watch

Dr Keith Rowley’s Emancipation Day Statement

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By Dr Keith Rowley
Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago
August 01, 2021 – Facebook

PM Dr Keith RowleyHappy Emancipation Day to all the people of Trinidad and Tobago, from the Government, my own family and myself on the occasion of Emancipation Day 2021.

Today, we recognise not just the horrific experience of our African ancestors – but the impact it continues to have on the lives of millions of their descendants.
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Culture, General T&T, PNM, Politics, Race and Identity, Racism Watch

Glorious day(s) of the happy and the free

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By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
August 01, 2021

PART 1

The masters were “dam tief”, the Governor an “old rogue”, and the King not such a fool as to buy them half free when he was rich enough to pay for them altogether.

—Port of Spain Gazette, August 5, 1834

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeToday is Emancipation Day. Ashton Ford, one of our respected elders, remembers the impetus that led former prime minister George Chambers to change the Discovery Day holiday (a day that recognised the misdeeds of our oppressors) to Emancipation Day that honours the achievements of our ancestors.

Chambers believed if you named your streets and monuments after local patriots, you encouraged a sense of nationhood and strengthened national identity among the population.
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General T&T, PNM, Politics, UNC

Car exemption hypocrisy

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By Errol Pilgrim
July 25, 2021 – trinidadexpress.com

Raffique ShahJohn Doe is not a government minister, neither is he head of any government department.

Mr Doe is among the thousands of ordinary workers in the public service entitled by law to tax-exempt purchases of motor cars.

Like his counterparts in other statutory bodies and throughout the public service, Doe is a travelling officer entitled – pandemic or no pandemic – to motor-car tax exemptions and a travelling allowance.
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Elections, General T&T, PNM, Politics, WASA

PNM’s Political Strategy To Deny Tobago Self-Governance

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By Stephen Kangal
July 25, 2021

Stephen KangalThe ill-advised, overtly hurried and premature introduction into Parliament of the two completely new Bills on June 28 last on the long-festering granting of autonomy/self-governance to Tobago prior to and without conducting the requisite inter-active consultations with the Tobago constituency of principal stakeholders by the PNM was a deliberate, deceptive, nefarious, dishonest and calculated politically -conceptualised strategy to shelve the Tobago issue.
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General T&T, Politics

Tobago Does Not Need this Self Government Bills Hamper

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By Stephen Kangal, CARONI
July 19, 2021

Stephen KangalWhile hampers are in high demand and par for the course of alleviating abject poverty today, Tobago after twenty-five years of civilised persistence for attaining genuine self-government and functional autonomy (2018 Bill) is being presented with a misleading hamper of Bills even though Tobago is politically well-endowed.

Tobagonians must submit themselves to that pittance irrespective of the extent to which these Bills have deviated from responding to their hitherto well-articulated legitimate expectations.
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Finance, General T&T, Politics, Recession

Make poverty a punishable crime

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By Raffique Shah
July 19, 2021

Raffique ShahEvery so often, and since Covid-19 struck, maybe all too often reporters in the mainstream media assail us with heart-rending stories of families living in abject poverty—you know the kind: mother with three-to-ten urchin-like children, no resident father or no explanation of his or their absence, crammed into a dilapidated shack that looks like it will collapse if you sneezed in it; the little faces staring into the cameras are poster-images for strife and famine in some God-forsaken distant land; and the cries are always the same… my children will starve to death… if only I had a house… no, I can’t afford to send them to school… we need food, clothes, books, electricity… and so on.
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General T&T, Parliament, PNM, Politics, UNC

Leadership is a choice, office not a prerequisite

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By Dr Indera Sagewan
July 14, 2021

Indera Sagewan, PhDNot all Ministers are leaders, but all Ministers believe themselves leaders. This is the misnomer of politics in T&T. I battled to stay on course with my promised part 2 of “people-centred recovery.” But, the offensive flaunting of parliamentary privilege to own a Benz/Prado, when thousands don’t have bread to eat won the war. Office does not equal leadership.
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General T&T, Parliament, PNM, Politics, UNC

Exploiting the Privileges of a Minister

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By Stephen Kangal
July 13, 2021

Stephen KangalThere at least two matters that I consider to be very frivolous and entirely vexatious in the unwarranted Statement of the AG delivered in the House when it met on Friday 2 July to consider The Finance Bill.

We had our saturation fill on these Bills on Monday to Wednesday last.
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General T&T, PNM, Politics, UNC

The danger of verbal violence

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By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
July 12, 2021

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeI don’t know how the acidic squabble between the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition will end, but I know that verbal violence can have as much devastating consequences as physical violence.

Two of our most prominent leaders cannot be at each other’s throats every day, with their hate-filled language poisoning the national blood stream.
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