By Newsday Reporter
June 12, 2014 – newsday.co.tt
THERE IS to be swift action to recover the $34 million paid to a contractor in the Life Sport programme for work that was never delivered.
The money, paid to carry out Math, English and Modern Technology studies with a focus on numeracy and literacy, was issued in two tranches of $17 million each last year but there is yet to be a stick of chalk or blackboard as proof of this.
Continue reading TAKE BACK $34M
By Raffique Shah
February 08, 2014
I know there are many people in the country who think that Keith Rowley is too black to be Prime Minister. I didn’t need Fitzgerald Hinds to tell me that, although his charge that such sentiment emanates from the bowels of the PNM, from important persons in the party, did surprise me somewhat.
I don’t know why we bury our heads in the sand when the issue of colour prejudice, which is often linked to race prejudice, rears its ugly head in the society. It has always been there, and, I imagine, it always will be. Most people of lighter or whiter complexion, whatever their ethnicity, believe they are superior to others who are dark-skinned, or worse, black.
Continue reading Judge not by colour
By Raffique Shah
September 08, 2013
Rather than re-shuffle her Cabinet for a third time in three years, Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar should have considered resigning and calling fresh general elections.
By an annual tinkering with her appointees and their portfolios, the PM has all but admitted she is incapable of leading the country, which, really, is nothing to be ashamed of. The great Eric Williams often complained this country was ungovernable. It still is.
Continue reading Governing the ungovernable
By Stephen Kangal
July 10, 2013
Warner chose the maximum advantage-minimum cost political strategy to enhance and repair his damaged post-FIFA image and to restore the political status quo ante- the Palmiste debacle.
All that he is alleged to have committed and not proven took place outside of the jurisdiction of T&T within the largessse of the FIFA culture of gift-giving. He did not steal from the people of T&T. The four legal opinions have discredited the Simmons Report as being legally and procedurally flawed and therefore worthless.
Continue reading The Charge of the Warner Brigade
By Andre Bagoo
March 04, 2013 – newsday.co.tt
THE WOMAN known as Juliana Pena, who has been described as former Prime Minister Patrick Manning’s spiritual adviser, was granted access to the construction site of the Prime Minister’s Residence and Diplomatic Centre, La Fantasie, St Ann’s in order to pray on it before it opened its doors in 2007.
Continue reading Manning Went to Guanapo Church
Former Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago and M.P for San Fernando East Patrick Manning along with his wife Hazel Manning walking through the crowd at the Calypso Fiesta during the recently concluded Carnival season.
Continue reading Former PM Patrick Manning Suffers Seizure
By Raffique Shah
June 23, 2012
YESTERDAY, David Abdulah was a darling of the People’s Partnership. To hear it from the mare’s mouth, David worked tirelessly to forge a working relationship among disparate elements whose commonality was not so much the love for country or liberty as it was their hatred for Patrick Manning. Mark you, yesterday, even Patrick hated Manning for his uncontrollable appetite for wastage of a windfall that could have been used to bring a measure of social and economic equity to a nation mired in inequities.
Continue reading Yesterday, today, tomorrow
By Dr. Selwyn R. Cudjoe
June 06, 2012
A few days ago, the People’s Partnership (PP) celebrated its second year of office amidst a lot of hype and propaganda. Their esteemed leader even tried to mamaguy Orville London by calling him “a bully and cry-baby” because, in his capacity as the Secretary of the THA, he sought a meeting with Kamla Persad Bissessar, in her capacity as the Prime Minister, to talk about the affairs of his country. Under normal circumstances, London would not necessarily have wanted to meet Persad Bissessar because there is nothing intellectually attractive or physically compelling about her. But such is the dynamics of power that the Prime Minister and her cohorts could say a lot of nonsense and get away with it because they control the political purse and constitutional discourses about the nation.
Continue reading PP: Taking Loud and Saying Nothing
By Dr. Selwyn R. Cudjoe
April 18, 2012
I never thought that Patrick Manning was such a genius and soothsayer, especially when he told us that one could turn ordinary CEPEP managers into captains of national and international industries; that, in fact, they could run corporations worth billions of dollars without flinching; and all that one needed to be a servant of the people was commonsense and a level head. In this formulation education attainment, business acumen, management skills, experience and maturity do not matter. To hear the PP tell it, these are just overrated and unnecessary appendages that have no place in a modern economy.
Continue reading Manning, The Genius
By Stephen Kangal
March 29, 2012
Years ago T&T’s former HC to India, Mr. Reginald Dumas went visiting the rural villages of the Indian state of Bihar assiduously looking for “jhandis” and found them. Last week another Afro-Tobagonian, Opposition Leader the Hon. Keith Rowley used the occasion of the CPA meeting being held in India to search for the elusive “jhandis” and according to him found none. And this after the PM Kamla Persad-Bissessar just returned from her Indian safari when the question of the rurally remote, sometimes inaccessible villages (pur) of the States of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar from which the “girmitiyas” came to T&T bearing their ‘Jahajee bundles” was well-documented.
Continue reading Rowley Went To India Looking for Jhandis?