Tag Archives: Raffique Shah

Elections, General T&T, Labour, PNM, Politics, Russia, UNC

Show me your leader

By Raffique Shah
August 29, 2022

Raffique ShahIt’s not so much that we have little or nothing to celebrate on the 60th anniversary of our Independence from Britain, as so many who swear they are patriots, but whose patriotism swings with the pendulum of their political party’s fortunes, which almost always are linked to their personal fortunes.

It’s more that our democracy has been carved up into near-equal but uneven parts in such manner, to misquote Irish poet William Yeats in his near-prophetic masterpiece, “The Second Coming”, “…Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world/The blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere/The ceremony of innocence is drowned/The best lack all conviction/While the worst/Are full of passionate intensity…”
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Crime in T&T, General T&T, Oil and Gas, Politics

Ten thousand-gun salute

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By Raffique Shah
August 22, 2022

Raffique ShahA few weeks ago, my cousin Susheela forwarded to me an interesting piece of Internet trivia that was anything but trivial. The author had given that generations in recorded history had lived through the most exciting period, based on facts cited, that people now in their 60s and 70s, having been born in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, had enjoyed some of the most dramatic developments man has ever experienced.
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General T&T, PNM, Politics, Racism Watch

Finding African farmers

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By Raffique Shah
August 15, 2022

Raffique ShahIt pains me whenever I feel it necessary to confront the race issue in my column. I see it as a waste of valuable column centimetres where those of us who have been selected by the managers and editors of newspapers to highlight and comment on matters of national importance instead find ourselves discussing drivel.

But there comes a time when columnists cannot ignore attempts by influential people in the society resorting to race, playing the race card when everything else fails them, in the hope that controversy might save them from oblivion, a fate politicians fear more than they do the hell-fire that is promised to believers and non-believers alike for the sinful lives they lead, convinced they are so clever, they can fool even the Creator.
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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, PNM, Politics, UNC

Let’s try ah madman instead

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By Raffique Shah
August 01, 2022

Raffique ShahI do not believe the people of Trinidad and Tobago, least of all those whose votes matter in a near-evenly-divided electorate, are ready for a leader who has the fortitude to take the resource-rich though now declining economy out of the cycles of poverty, stagnation and prosperity, to put it firmly on track such that it steers as close as is possible to an equitable distribution of its wealth—or suffering—and in the painful process deliver us from the evils of free-wheeling capitalism and neo-liberalism that coagulates into one of the filthy-rich, dirt-poor extremities that are imploding across the world, their populations equally stripped of all hope as ours is, the only difference being this time we go down with the ship since there are no alternative options.
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General T&T, PNM, Politics, Racism Watch, UNC

Circling like corbeaux

By Raffique Shah
July 25, 2022

Raffique ShahNothing defined the great dividing line in this country the way the Law Association lawyers’ motion to have Attorney General Reginald Armour resign from office did when it came before the legal fraternity two weeks ago.

As people with an iota of common sense will have noted, while there was an element of race in the proceedings, it was not the only, or even the main factor that drove the campaign to oust the AG. It was all political—a straight case of who in the profession supported the incumbent PNM Government, or who supported the Opposition UNC. The stench of politics in what can be said to have been a minor confrontation was overpowering.
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Crime in T&T, General T&T

Fight…or die like cowards

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Raffique Shah
July 18, 2022

Raffique ShahFor many readers, my recollections of “Shanty Town” and the “La Basse” in the 1950s-’60s stirred memories of another day, an era from which the society ought to have long evolved.

Others thought I exaggerated wildly in my description of corbeaux and half-naked boys wrestling over discarded meat. I wonder if I had added to creatures I saw foraging for food the biggest hogs I had lain eyes on among the “gladiators” in that putrid “gayelle” that was the “La Basse”, what they might have thought of me: a writer whose imagination had gone wild?
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Crime in T&T, General T&T, PNM, Police, Politics, Protest

Beetham: man vs corbeaux

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By Raffique Shah
July 11, 2022

Raffique ShahMany moons ago, when I was young, idealistic and very much a utopian dreamer, I had a vision for a new Beetham community. It will have formed in the early 1960s when I first travelled to Port of Spain frequently.

The route the taxis used from Chaguanas was the relatively new Princess Margaret Highway (commissioned in 1954, I think), turning west onto the Churchill-Roosevelt (built by the US armed forces in 1941 to service the largest air force base in this part of the world, Fort Read in Wallerfield, and used exclusively by military vehicles until it was handed over to the local authorities in 1949). The CRH ended at Barataria. From that point, before the Beetham Highway was opened in ’56, all traffic to PoS had to return to the Eastern Main Road to access PoS.
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Crime in T&T, General T&T, Violence

Power of the gun

By Raffique Shah
July 04, 2022

Raffique ShahWe are not the most crime-ridden country in the world, notwithstanding claims to that effect by organisations and individuals that manipulate raw data from dubious sources so that they can support whatever theory or argument their authors wish to pursue.

For example, there are academics and criminologists who rely on official police numbers that could be quite misleading. To support my argument, I ask: can the police or other government agency in many densely-populated, slum-infested countries and cities (think India, Nigeria, Brazil, Mexico, the Philippines…) accurately account for every living or dead soul in such human-jungles? Hell, in the comparatively minuscule Beetham Estate or Sea Lots in Trinidad and Tobago, people live and die and never appear on records, so wheel and come back if you expect me to buy “official” data as being accurate.
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General T&T, Health, Labour, Trade Unions

Benefits, not increases

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By Raffique Shah
June 20, 2022

Raffique ShahIt’s not so much that in a complex new world forged and driven by technology that comprises lightening-speed communications and incredible capacities for generating, processing, storing and distributing information that trade unions have been blindsided by microchips that could signal their demise.

Indeed, as my comrades make their way to Fyzabad today for the march and rally, they should feel proud to be part of an organisation that, during its 85-year history in Trinidad and Tobago, has, pound-for-pound, contributed more than any other toward the upliftment of the society. For people who have never participated in or attended the annual event, shame on you. I mean no insult when I say that you will brave storms and travel to Wah-he-oh-ho where alcohol and “wining” to sweet soca music are the only items that are on the agenda.
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