By Stephen Kangal
January 12, 2007
Arrogance and insensitivity continues to cloud what little judgment is left in Works Minister, Colm Imbert, in dealing with the increasing chorus of critics of his billion-dollar Trinidad Rapid Rail (TRRP) elephantine monstrosity. Imbert as a servant of the people must curb his penchant for discrediting and impugning the integrity of the TRRP messengers with the hope that their message will be ignored and seen as self-serving. Imbert and Manning are driven by objectivity. The rest of us in T&T are influenced by emotions especially when we disagree with their smelters and rail monstrosities.
Continue reading Discrediting the Rapid Rail Messengers
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.
I have never ceased to agonise in mental pain at the continuing undue pressures being exerted on our Indian community to exercise constant and eternal vigilance geared to curb and correct the natural predilection of some public decision-makers in Trinidad and Tobago to exclude its presence from public symbols that claim by depicting selectively to represent the cultural diversity of our multicultural landscape. The absence of Indian names of public buildings and notably roadways are relevant in this regard.
Chief Justice Satnarine Sharma has been charged and is now on $250.000 bail. The Chief Justice surrendered to the police to face charges following losing his appeal at the Privy Council. He maintains he did no wrong.