Tag Archives: T&T Govt

General T&T, PNM, Politics, Protest

Playing games with people’s lives

8 Comments

By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
January 31, 2022

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeIt is with regret that I return to PNM’s neglect of its people. It seems that nothing one says or does can make its ministers recognise their tone-deaf responses to the cries of their people. It is, as my mother used to say, “like stick break in dey ears”.

I couldn’t help but feel this way when I read Minister Marvin Gonzales’s response to reporters after he and Port of Spain South MP Keith Scotland visited John John and Sea Lots, with a view to repairing the sewage issues that have plagued the people of the latter area for several years.
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corruption, Crime in T&T, General T&T, Media, Police, Politics

FULs no solution to crime problem

5 Comments

By Raffique Shah
January 31, 2022

Raffique ShahIf there was anything shocking about the non-appointment of a new Commissioner of Police, the simultaneous publication of the retired Justice Stanley John’s report and the stench that emanated from the innards of the records room when its files were opened, it was the surprise expressed by citizens over the scandalous state of affairs in the Police Service.
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corruption, COVID-19, Finance, Food, General T&T, Health, International, Recession

Talk to me about patriotism

4 Comments

By Raffique Shah
January 24, 2022

Raffique ShahIt didn’t take Nobel Prize-winning economists such as St Lucia’s Sir Arthur Lewis, or the USA’s Milton Friedman or Paul Krugman, to project that as the world economy emerged from an unprecedented virtual lockdown that lasted three, four, who knows how many years during the Covid pandemic, commodity prices, especially those of goods and services that are critical to the recovery of countries across the world, would rise rapidly, putting them beyond the reach of the poorest nations and the poor in every nation.
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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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COVID-19, General T&T, Health

Army of the vaccinated

3 Comments

By Raffique Shah
January 17, 2022

Raffique ShahI am writing this column on Saturday morning, so I have no idea what the PM would have announced at his media briefing in the afternoon.

But with the drums of political war growing ominously louder by the day, and increasing in volume and tempo, and those who are looking to unseat his Government long before the due date for fresh elections, buoyed as they are by Watson Duke’s sound licking on the PNM in the recent Tobago House of Assembly election, they are doing everything to frustrate him, to goad the PM into calling snap elections, which they believe they can win, whoever “they” may be, whatever their agendas.
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COVID-19, General T&T, Health, Politics

Bring back the ‘Bull’

6 Comments

By Raffique Shah
January 10, 2022

Raffique ShahNot even George Orwell, who wrote the right-wing classic Animal Farm which summarised workers in power, post-revolution, in the worst possible light, could have scripted the post-Covid tragi-comedy that premiered a few weeks ago, when the Delta variant of the virus first showed what it could do, and now Omicron is breaking box office records, leaving mankind stupefied.
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Elections, General T&T, PDP, PNM, Politics, THA, Tobago

Move Satan move

5 Comments

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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Business, COVID-19, Finance, General T&T, Health, Oil and Gas, Recession

Covid and gas pains: who’s crying now?

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By Raffique Shah
January 03, 2022

Raffique ShahThe Covid-induced confinement imposed on citizens by the Government provoked a range of reactions—from anger and drunkenness to solitude and self-pity. Some persons came perilously close to crossing the thin line between sanity and insanity.

I was lucky to have lived the multi-faceted life I did before the pandemic—soldier, adventurer, prisoner, politician, teacher and a range of other life-skills that prepared me for just about anything I might face during the pandemic. Of course, as a human being and more so a humanist, I was shocked by the mass of people globally who were impacted by the virus, by how many were dying “live” before the lenses of reporters’ cameras, ­agony etched on their faces, questions writ large on them: why me?
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COVID-19, General T&T, Health, Politics

Let Medical Professionals Speak on COVID Vaccines

4 Comments

By Stephen Kangal
December 23, 2021

Stephen KangalThe emotionally charged response of Prime Minister Rowley to the Sunday Express feature article is exclusively more political than the requisite scientific in relation to his weak defense of the alleged low efficacy of the Sinopharm vaccine.

He procured it with a secretive agreement from the Chinese with a huge cost — loan in a large quantity without obtaining any expected guarantee about its expected efficacy level even though scientists from developed countries refused to accept it as a genuine vaccine because trial results were not published globally and were not accessible.
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Education, General T&T

Human rights, equality and diversity

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By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
December 20, 2021

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeDespite its fancy-sounding title, “Human Rights, Equality and Diversity: An Inquiry into the Right to Equal Access to Education with Specific Focus on the Under-performance of Schools in Port of Spain and Environs”, the children in this area (mainly Africans) will be condemned to educational backwaters even as the Ministry of Education (MoE) continues with its anachronistic approach of not-educating our children.
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