The 22-member team of government members, businessmen, economists and activists is chaired by Prime Minister Keith Rowley. It is tasked with the responsibility of creating a COVID-19 Roadmap to Recovery for Trinidad and Tobago.
The team has issued a call to all citizens to let their voices be heard by submitting their views on the way forward for T&T.
Continue reading ‘Roadmap to Recovery’ team invites public to make submissions
By Raffique Shah
May 4, 2020
Memo 02 to the post-COVID-19 Recovery Team: Gentlemen, and the few ladies among you, greetings. I have chosen to communicate with you in full glare of the public because I do not wish to be seen as saying and doing nothing when my country needed every citizen to contribute what he or she could in the aftermath of a disaster such as the world has never experienced.
Continue reading Memo 02 to Team Recovery: Freeze motor imports
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
May 4, 2020
“If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him.”
—James 1:5 KJV
Fifty eight years ago Eric Williams (PNM) and Rudranath Capildeo (DLP/UNC) went to Marlborough House to discuss the path forward to create an independent nation. Williams was determined to take the country into independence while Capildeo wanted to make sure that Afro-Trinbagonians, the majority group, did not discriminate against Indo-Trinbagonians. Subsuming their party interests to the national interest, they inscribed a minority platform into the country’s constitution that protected the rights of Indo-Trinbagonians and other ethnic groups.
Continue reading Re-charting our Ruins
T&T FACES US SANCTIONS – ROWLEY’S DANGEROUS ALLIANCE WITH VENEZUELA CAN NOW DESTROY OUR ECONOMY
By Kamla Persad-Bissessar
Good morning everyone.
It is with serious alarm that I note a report in today’s Trinidad Guardian about the United States probing our country over a Trinidad &Tobago fuel shipment linked to Venezuela. If true, our country’s very economic survival is at stake. This since, as our longstanding and greatest global ally, any such rift could gravely damage our very beneficial trade, national security and foreign relations with the United States.
Continue reading Kamla Courts Sanctions, Rowley Responds
Indian Officer Leads
African Soldiers in Black Power Revolt
“Creolised” Indians Sowed Seeds for Birth of ULF
By Raffique Shah
June 09, 2000 – trinicenter.com
IN 1970, I was the only Indian officer in the Trinidad and Tobago Regiment. I was also the youngest officer, having graduated from Sandhurst in July 1966, some four months after I had turned 20. When I returned from England in January 1967 to take up duties as a platoon commander, it was the first time I got to know the Regiment (as it was, and still is, commonly referred to), since I was sent to Sandhurst in 1964 without any prior training locally. At the time, fewer than five per cent of soldiers were Indians, a ratio that may still exist, although I suspect the numbers will have moved up slightly.
Continue reading Black Power and Indians
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
April 29, 2020
Alberta Smith (not her real name), my dear friend, has been a primary school teacher for thirty years. She didn’t like last week’s article and didn’t put water in her mouth to tell me so. She sent the following response which I was free to reproduce once I omitted her real name. She wrote:
Continue reading In Defense of Teachers
By Raffique Shah
April 27, 2020
My younger brother Farouk caught me unawares one evening last week when he telephoned me saying, “The PM used the ‘F’ word today!” “What?” I asked in shock, thinking that either Prime Minister Keith Rowley or Farouk was going off. “He did!” Farouk persisted. “He spoke about food.” The joke was on me, and we enjoyed a hearty laugh at my expense.
Continue reading Hungry people, angry people
By Stephen Kangal
April 26, 2020
A third Road Multi-Sectoral and micro and macro conceptualised Map is now being engineered and brainstormed by the PNM Government. Both the previous 2020 and 2030 Vision Road Maps were shelved because the PNM is politically notorious for conceptualization plans but total failures when it comes to critical implementation commitments.
Continue reading A COVID Recovery Road Map with Too Many Junctions
By Raffique Shah
April 21, 2020
When a nation wages war, and when that war is just, it is the duty of every able-bodied citizen to support his or her country, each according to his ability. In the current situation, the entire world is at war against the invisible CORVID-19 virus that is wreaking death and destruction in an unprecedented global attack. In most countries, people have rallied behind their governments, battling in the frontlines and from their homes, executing simple strategies that are formulated to deny the killer-virus a fertile environment in which it thrives, hence containing it and starving it to death.
Continue reading Assessing the leader
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
April 20, 2020
As a teacher, I was interested in the exchange between Anthony Garcia, the minister of education (MOE), and Antonia De Freitas, president of the TTUTA, with regard to how best to continue teaching our nation’s pupils while schools are closed because of the coronavirus pandemic. The MOE wanted to “determine the extent to which students had access to learning materials while schools were closed” (Newsday, April 11) so it could determine the best platform to deliver online teaching for our pupils.
Continue reading “All Ah We in This Together…”