By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
April 19, 2025
Once John Jeremie, Kennedy Swaratsingh and yours truly supported UNC publicly, darkness would seek to prevail over light, stupidity would try to dwarf intelligence, and moral degeneracy would erupt with diabolic fierceness.
I couldn’t conceive the conversation would descend to the vulgarity to which the former Leader of Our Grief and Sorrow took it: “I have five dogs and I’m handy with a shovel, so John Jeremie does not faze me or the PNM.” (Guardian, April 15); Jeremie was “a dog in the PNM. I can call him that” (Express, April 18).
Jeremie’s support for the UNC roused the Leader’s animal spirit. Frantz Fanon, one of the Caribbean’s leading political thinkers and a psychiatrist, examined this self-loathing behaviour in Black Skin, White Masks. He described how such a person behaves when he is transfixed by “the white gaze”. (See David Macey, Frantz Fanon.)
Jeremie had the audacity to challenge the Squatter PM’s proposition that only black people use their race affiliation to determine how they vote. All other groups, he implied, are freed from such racial/ethnic constraints. They are race-neutral. But blacks are so inundated in their blackness that they carry this identity wherever they go.
I was not surprised when Jeremie declared: “Tonight as an educated black man with a certain degree of academic and national accomplishments I stand here in front of you to endorse the United National Congress” (Express, April 15).
That black man had to be going mad. How could he use his God-given intelligence to determine that historical necessity (how history predetermines things) demand that he vote for the UNC? Indeed, how could he untether his intelligence from his ethnic “baggage”?
Jeremie also displayed his understanding of our economic future: “The economy is beyond crisis. We have basically spent all of our reserves in the past ten years, and all the economic and social indicators suggest that we are in a place beyond crisis.”
When the PNM came into office in 2015, it inherited a reserve account of over US$10 billion, representing 11 months of import cover. By 2025, this was reduced by half. It comprises assets and US foreign borrowings. So while in theory we may have US$5.2 billion in foreign reserves, no one knows what the real value is of our foreign account reserves.
The UNC government made the last investment into our future when it invested US$325 million to purchase shares in the Latin American Development Bank. Colm Imbert, former finance minister, indicated he borrowed US$1 billion.
Only the previous investments of the UNC government made this possible. Over the past ten years, the PNM Government made no investments or savings into our foreign reserves account.
Current economic data shows we are in a deep crisis. Our debt is growing, we might be downgraded by international rating agencies, our reserves are declining, the Dragon field negotiation has been a bust, so our coo coo is cooked. We have not diversified our economy, failed to earn and distribute foreign exchange, and there is a growing lack of confidence in our Government.
This mismanagement of our economy has resulted in incomplete projects, a growing divide between the rich and the poor (the Leader’s desired outcome), the decimation of the middle class, and the pauperisation of the African and Indian communities, although we spent half a trillion dollars over the last ten years.
On Wednesday, the Rt Rev Claude Berkley, Bishop of Trinidad and Tobago, addressed the members of the Caribbean Court of Justice. He said:
“I am minded to ask for your discernment and possible action on some aspect of our Caribbean life as we continue to evolve out of the trauma of enslavement and related forms of subjugation… and to help us along… on utilising the [themes] of International Decade for People of African Descent—recognition, justice, and development.”
Yet, the only way the Leader can describe the offspring of Quashie and Cudjoe is as the filth of the earth. He has never described the children of Elias and Young in a similar manner. But then, that is all one can expect from someone who detests his own.
Fanon cautions: “We will have to bind up for years to come the many, sometimes ineffaceable, wounds that the colonialist onslaught has inflicted on our people.
“The imperialism which today is fighting against a true liberation of mankind leaves in its wake here and there tinctures of decay which we must search out and mercilessly expel from our land and our spirits.” (The Wretched of the Earth.)
The Leader should use his shovel and his dogs to remove the filth he has inflicted upon our land. Neither Eric Williams, George Chambers nor Patrick Manning have ever been so disrespectful to black people. The Leader should spend the rest of his life learning to love his dark-skinned self.