Category Archives: PNM

General T&T, PNM, Politics, Racism Watch, UNC

Preparing the Way for Kamla – Pt 7

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By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
July 18, 2018

PART 7

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeOn July 14, 2003, my mother took her bath, got dressed, went to the polling station located at St. Mary’s Children Home, Tacarigua, and voted for PNM. Two weeks later she was dead. She never voted for any other party in Trinidad and Tobago (T&T).

When Eric Williams arrived on the political scene in 1954 my mother worked in a white woman’s kitchen. When he defied the colonial powers and proclaimed the dignity of black and brown people (“Massa Day Done,” he proclaimed), my mother saw him as a political messiah and PNM as the vehicle to take her out of a house of bondage and into a land of liberty.
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Crime in T&T, General T&T, PNM, Police, Politics

Citizens Deserve the Imbert Treatment Too

By Tyehimba Salandy
July 16, 2018

Colm ImbertThe recent incident of the Minister of Finance Colm Imbert’s son being robbed provided one more example of something that most Trinbagonians know deeply. That is, the law firstly and most responsively serves the elite members of the society. After being robbed on Friday, the phone was recovered on Monday in the Beetham area. Ordinary citizens were understandably outraged because the speedy police action was much different to what they may be accustomed to in similar cases.
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General T&T, Oil and Gas, PNM, UNC

Petrotrin: radical surgery…or die

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Br Raffique Shah
July 12, 2018

Raffique ShahI never thought I’d one day write a column that says what I’m about to. But as someone who has always put country before personal or ideological interests regardless of the fire I faced, I feel compelled to endorse calls for a radical restructuring of State-owned oil company Petrotrin.

If there is resistance to life-saving changes, declare the damn company bankrupt and shut it down.
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General T&T, PNM, Politics, Racism Watch, UNC

Preparing the Way for Kamla – Pt 6

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By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
July 11, 2018

PART 6

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeIf one listened to the scholars and scribes, one would think that when the Indians came to Trinidad in 1845 they met a barren land where Africans played and joked around. No one would believe that those Africans, working from sunup to sundown, made William Hardin Burnley, an Englishman who came to Trinidad in 1802, the richest resident slave owner in the West Indies (see my forthcoming book, The Slave Master of Trinidad).
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General T&T, Oil and Gas, PNM, Politics

Frankie, don’t mess with us

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By Raffique Shah
July 07, 2018

Raffique ShahYou’d think with all the entertainment from and excitement over World Cup football in Russia, we’d be spared the drudgery of everyday crime, inexcusable lawlessness and political bacchanal at least for one month. After all, it seems that everyone is riveted to a television set somewhere on “match-days”, which have been every day, almost all day, over the past two weeks. In fact, football fever has intensified during the knockout matches that will climax when new champions are crowned on Sunday, July 15.
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General T&T, PNM, Politics, UNC

Preparing the Way for Kamla – Pt 5

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By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
July 4, 2018

PART 5

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeI have rarely received so many responses to my articles as those I received about my previous column. Once I had the temerity to describe the business activities of the Syrian-Lebanese community I opened up a whole batchak nest unleashing the deadly fury that such colonies contain.

Ant colonies, made up of thousands of insects, are precise, efficient and an organized machine. They behave as a deadly unit. E. O. Wilson, the evolutionary biologist explained, “The activities of the individuals in an ant colony are so perfectly integrated it is almost as though they were part of a single organism. The insects do everything by instinct and they literally are programmed automatons.”
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General T&T, PNM, Politics, Racism Watch, UNC

Preparing the Way for Kamla – Pt 4

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By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
June 25, 2018

PART 4

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeSixteen years hence, Trinidad and Tobago (T&T) will celebrate its two hundredth anniversary since slavery ended formally. As I open my eyes, I am not sure I can see as clearly as the Minister of Finance how the African population will be positioned within the society in 2034.

Last Sunday I argued that by 2030, the Indian population will grow to between 588,000 and 776,000 people or 41 percent of the population; Africans will grow to between 525,000 and 615,000 people but remain about 36 percent of the population; and the mixed population will grow to between 339,000 and 417,000 people or 22 percent. In short, the African population will have dropped from 73 percent in 1803 to 36 percent in 2034.
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Crime in T&T, General T&T, PNM, UNC

Preparing the Way for Kamla – Pt 3

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By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
June 20, 2018

PART 3

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeIt’s an iconographic image, one that is indicative of our times: the destruction of black men in an age of unreason and indifference.

There they are: a brother in a blue polo shirt that reads “salopian” on his breast. Another brother holds him back as he vents his anger against Laventille West MP Fitzgerald Hinds on Old St. Joseph Road. Brother Hinds, decked out in a Panama hat and trademark deadlocks that falls below his waist, seemed absolutely engrossed in the pain and anger directed against him (Guardian, June 9).
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Finance, General T&T, PNM, Politics, Property Tax, UNC

Valuation Division off on wrong foot

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By Raffique Shah
June 15, 2018

Raffique ShahOftentimes, civic and professional organisations that stay aloof of the political mud-wrestling that has long been the dominant feature of our parliamentary system, provide citizens with greater clarity on legislation that impact our lives than our warring politicians do.

Such is the case with the controversial Property Tax Act and its many amendments. On every occasion that the legislation has come before Parliament, it has generated a fish-market-like cacophony and wild fear-mongering to the extent that an entire general election campaign (2010) was conducted on the theme “axe the tax”, and the Manning government fell, albeit on issues wider and larger than the tax.
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corruption, Elections, General T&T, PNM, Politics, UNC

Campaign financing: laws will hardly help

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By Raffique Shah
May 24, 2018

Raffique ShahIt was perhaps an indicator of just how inured this society is to corruption that, except for an Express editorial, no one has commented on Justice Frank Seepersad’s scathing but incisive remarks in his ruling against Jack Warner in a $1.5 million lawsuit that reeked of political machinations.

The lawsuit was filed by Krishna Lalla, who admitted to being a supporter of the United National Congress, although he denied that the money he had “loaned” Warner in 2007 was a campaign contribution to the UNC for the election that year, which the party lost.
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