By Dr. Selwyn R. Cudjoe
June 26, 2012
I don’t know Ancel Roget. I never met the brother until last Tuesday when I attended the Labor Day rally at Charlie King Junction in Fyzabad. I was impressed tremendously by his eloquence and force. His address was pitched directly to matters at hand and raised substantial questions. His address was stamped with his character and did much credit to the labor movement.
Continue reading Learning from Ancel Roget’s Insights
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 10, 2012
While I thank Ralph Maraj for his advice, I am not inclined to accept many of his formulations about the People’s National Movement (See Express, April 14 & June 5, 2012). Although he may be generous in offering his suggestions, the party should say thanks but no thanks to what comes over as a disingenuous plug for the People’s Partnership. Keeping in mind Maraj’s political history—his grasshopping tendency to jump from one party to another—dedicated members of the PNM should think twice before they accept what he has to say.
Continue reading Thanks, But No Thanks
By Stephen Kangal
June 07, 2012
Ralph Maraj’s advice to the PNM is simplistic, cosmetic and fundamentally off the radar. He deludes himself into believing that the deeply embedded and fossilized, original, organizationally-driven culture of ethno-nationalism and secrecy can be easily changed when in fact the electorate has grown fed up and disenchanted of PNM’s several public relations reincarnations. The demographics have changed but the PNM remains insensitive to this political reality. It will not re-brand itself to pander to the new cosmopolitanism.
Continue reading The PNM Leopard Cannot Change Its Stripes
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
May 23, 2012
Indiscipline has its consequences. As a nation we are paying for this indiscipline in every phase of national life up to and including the unprecedented road fatalities on our highways. Yesterday it was the Acting Chief Justice; tomorrow it could be the President or the Prime Minister. If we do not come to our senses we will pay drastically for the indiscipline that plagues our nation. It is a disease that the old are passing on to the young.
Continue reading Leading by Example
By Raffique Shah
April 22, 2012
THE imbroglio in the People’s Partnership Government prompted me to examine more closely how and why the People’s National Movement (PNM) has been central to the electoral politics of this country for more than 50 years. This may sound like flawed logic. But I noted that several of the principal players in the People’s Partnership impasse have said that whatever their differences or their failure to settle them, the parties that form the current government must stay together to prevent the PNM from regaining power.
Continue reading The more things change…
By Raffique Shah
April 14, 2012
FIFTY years after Trinidad and Tobago was granted independence, the tragedy of our politics is that it still revolves around the PNM, the party that took the country from colonialism through self-government and into independence. Indeed, the fact that the PNM remained in office for 36 of those 50 years is itself an indictment against the electorate. Worse than that, though, the three other concoctions that broke the PNM’s stranglehold—the NAR, the UNC, and now the UNC-dominated People’s Partnership—all had as their common bond, their raison d’etre, one mantra: we are against the PNM.
Continue reading Marking time 50 years later
By Dr. Selwyn R. Cudjoe
April 03, 2012
Now that Jack Warner has won PP’s chairmanship, there is a rumor that Winston Dookeran may be leaving the legislature to join the IDB in Barbados and Marlene Coudray is preparing to fight San Fernando East, it is time to ask whether the PNM is organized is to face the challenges that lie ahead in the short-term (such as a Tunapuna and San Fernando bye-elections) and in the long-term such as the general election of 2015.
Continue reading The Fat Ass Brigade
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?