By Raffique Shah
September 13, 2025
As I move along slowly towards what will be, if I make it, my 80th year on this here earth, mostly I feel as if I am not relevant to what’s happening around me. There was a time when I would easily sit behind my laptop and write up very sound, must-read columns that my many fans would call in to cuss or kiss me over, depending not so much on what was written but how it was written.
Continue reading TTT, Goebbels, and geriatrics
By Raffique Shah
September 06, 2025
I have remained fascinated for 50 years and more by how the story (or stories) of my exploits, whenever I’ve had cause to recall details, might help people who were born long after the Mutiny at Teteron Barracks to understand what it looked like.
I had that experience again last week when I was putting together some notes; memoirs to prepare my manuscript for publication. People who listen to the story of how two 24-year-young lieutenants trained at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst joined with their soldiers, leading the latter as we seized control of the barracks.
Continue reading Aunty Kams, the bad-Jane
By Raffique Shah
August 30, 2025
Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar can never be as uninformed as she portrays herself to be in matters of foreign affairs, to wit: regional and hemispheric alliances. It took previous governments, starting with the PNM in the 1960s, to cultivate good relations with our Spanish-speaking neighbours in Venezuela.
We often forgot then, as many states now learn, that there is the vast expanse of Portuguese-speaking Brazil a step away from Venezuela.
Continue reading Sleeping with the enemy
By Raffique Shah
August 16, 2025
I hope I am mistaken, that I have purged myself of the spirit of the sugar industry that came with the first colonisers and all but strangled Trinidad and Tobago’s economy for many years. I am not ungrateful, mark you, for what sugar has given us by way of revenues and opportunities and “solid, liquid cash”, according to Mastana Bahar’s hosts. But its contribution to the wealth of the nation may well have been close to zilch when one considers the number of times it lost money, wrecked people’s savings, and left the country in a state of disaster.
Continue reading I Commend PM Kamla
By Raffique Shah
August 09, 2025
By the time US President Donald Trump is finished with us, and here I mean the world as we know it now, our world will have changed likely to a backward civilisation, if there is anything civil about reversing progress.
I make this pronouncement boldly as a projection, not prediction, since I don’t believe in hocus-pocus. But he is deep into it and so are many of his “Jim Jones-like cultist followers”.
Continue reading The New Age Hitler
By Raffique Shah
August 02, 2025
I am very confused by the problems many teenagers face as they come to the end of one cycle or other of the education system. Many moons ago when my generation ended our “schooling” we had a clear vision of what lay ahead.
Those among us who failed the Secondary School Entrance Examination—and there were options there—a significant percentage would move into the secondary school system by attending one of the many private secondary colleges. They would sit an entrance exam to the college of choice and, once successful, their parents would make payments to have them educated. Others who found that cumbersome would opt for what in today’s language is known as business studies.
Continue reading What a world
By Raffique Shah
July 26, 2025
I find it inexcusable that adult Trinidadians and Tobagonians who have benefited from the education and training that this country has offered easily fall victim to modern-day Trinidad “smart-men”.
CCN journalist Mark Bassant has focused on an “investment” that has relieved a significant number of our citizens who, in a couple of years, lost millions of dollars, in some cases, to a bunch of fellas who looked like they never even graduated pre-school. What is even more disturbing is among the people who invested are lawyers and doctors, professionals who are supposed to be “bright”.
Continue reading Beware of greed
By Raffique Shah
July 12, 2025
After researching the Internet extracting information that would lead me to a possible exit from the suffering that poverty imposes on people, I concluded that the way out of poverty is to ignore those who are stricken by its malafides.
Poverty spares not one country. Even the wealthy countries have vagrants. Some of the brightest minds, backed by generous funding for university and other research agencies, have attempted to peer behind the tattered curtains that shroud poverty. Their conclusions and possible solutions are jokes. When calypsonian the Mighty Shadow (Winston Bailey) belted out his thought-provoking theories in song, he achieved nothing. Not the money earned from the sale of the song, mark you.
Continue reading Permanent poverty
By Raffique Shah
July 05, 2025
I am intrigued by Trade Minister Kama Maharaj’s plan to focus on tourism as one of the main pillars of the new economy. It seems to me that every government that has taken the reins of office over the past 30 years has had tourism in its sights. There is always a promise to woo tourists to this country but they hardly materialise in any significant manner.
I say this not to be critical of tourism as a contributor to the economy of our country. However, there are few countries that have benefited in any significant manner such that they could rely on tourism for improving their foreign exchange earnings and providing jobs that we normally associate with economic growth and social benefits.
Continue reading A little manners won’t hurt
By Raffique Shah
June 28, 2025
Many years ago, when I was in my 20s, issues like the state of our national economy didn’t just stimulate my curiosity, but provoked my interest in my country’s future. Then, “UWI Men” such as Lloyd Best, Dr James Millette, and a fella who went by the fancy name “John La Guerre” were interviewed at budget time and invariably pronounced ominously on our future. Anytime those fellas intervened in anything to do with the national economy, they would find doom and gloom.
Continue reading An uncertain future