By Raffique Shah
June 06, 2019
Two crews, one from the URP and the other from the CEPEP, descended upon the two-by-two street on which I live during the past two weeks in a kind of pincer attack that I am convinced was devised by mid-level officials of the programmes to show citizen Shah how taxpayers’ dollars are wasted, and how we can do nothing about the wastage.
An in-my-face kind of gesture, probably with the finger…
Continue reading Look into the mirror, people
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
June 06, 2019
The Tacarigua Welfare and Improvement Council, also known as the Tacarigua Village Council, was established on 23 May 1945. Its first meeting was held at the “Cocoa House” that was built by enslaved Africans in 1837. Vernon Scott, the headmaster of St. Mary’s Anglican School and the person under whom I began my teaching career, was the first president of the Council.
Continue reading Land Grabbing with Government’s Assistance
By Raffique Shah
May 29, 2019
Consider the following: in 2019, when the 20-year contract for Train 1 of the Atlantic LNG plant expired and a new contract was negotiated, supposedly giving the people of Trinidad and Tobago a fairer share of the profits, the principal shareholder of the Train, BPTT, cast doubt over its future viability based on an unreliable supply of natural gas occasioned by two (or four?) “dry holes” in the energy giant’s infill drilling programme offshore T&T.
Continue reading Four trains too far?
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
May 28, 2019
“Whenever you ignore whispers, you do so at your own peril. Sometimes they may be the truth.”
—Eric Williams, PNM’s Founding father
Ok! Minister Colm Imbert, PNM party chairman, did not bouff Education Minister Anthony Garcia. Garcia was asked “a barrage of questions” and Imbert intervened politely, according to Laurel Lezama-Lee Sing, PNM’s public relations officer, “to remind him [Garcia] that the press conference was about party issues” (Express, May 20).
Continue reading Whispers of Corrupting Practices
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
May 20, 2019
“I bear a grudge that we in Trinidad do not pay enough attention to our heroes. They are the people that will give Trinidad life.”
—Beryl McBurnie quoted in Judy Raymond, Beryl McBurnie
There has been much coverage about the horrible murder of the prime minister’s boyhood friend John Miles and his wife Eulyn at the hands of a monstrously deranged person. This dastardly act led the PM to bemoan: “What have we become? What are we producing as ‘the next generation’? John and I grew up together in poverty, with pride, but violence and criminality were never part of our life” (Express, May 4).
Continue reading Cultural & Environmental Violence
By Raffique Shah
April 15, 2019
The continuous cacophony over the state of the national economy is confusing me, as I imagine it confounding the vast majority of the population, including many of those who promote themselves, or who are presented by the media as experts to pontificate on the topic.
If I confused readers with my opening paragraph, rest assured that was not deliberate. It’s just that every Monday morning some Government minister announces that the ailing economy, having been rescued from the intensive care unit from near-death inflicted by his predecessors, suffering foreign-currency-asphyxia, is now stable-to-robust enough to have gone on a training run in preparation for the Miracle Economies Olympiad.
Continue reading No to devaluation
…ex MP Collin Partap slams party
By Gail Alexander
May 06, 2019 – guardian.co.tt
Corruption allegations put the People’s Partnership (PP)/United National Congress (UNC) administration out of office in the 2010 general polls and more allegations or corruption-related charges against UNC members could well keep the UNC out of government in the 2020 general election.
It’s not a PNMite saying that. It’s former UNC Cumuto/Manzanilla MP and minister of state, Collin Partap doing so.
Continue reading Alleged corruption hurts UNC again
By Stephen Kangal
May 01, 2019
It is patently clear that Prime Minister Rowley grabbed the quite innocuous, viewed from a local context, but attention-attracting Sat Statement and attempted to clothe it with the now infamous Calcutta Ship robes geared to arrest the declining support for the PNM in Tobago from the rise and rise of the Duke factor.
It was engineered to achieve the same electoral result as Sandy’s 2013 Statement and to nip the incipient electoral fortunes of Minority Leader Watson Duke in the bud.
Continue reading Calcuttising Sat’s Message To Tobagonians
By Raffique Shah
April 23, 2019
As I watched the mayhem unfold across Sri Lanka last Sunday, the death toll from multiple bombings at churches and hotels mounting from the initial count of 160 as some of the severely injured succumbed to their injuries, I thought of how fortunate we in Trinidad and Tobago have been thus far. More than that, I wondered if the purveyors of divisiveness, those who routinely stoke the fires of racial, religious and political discord in this otherwise harmonious society, realise the dangers to which they expose us all.
Continue reading Stoking the fires of racial discord
By Stephen Kangal
April 23, 2019
The comments of Sat Maharaj on poor productivity practices that stultify and retard the economic development of Tobago including its current justification for exercising greater autonomy were substantially no different from those uttered by Dr Rita Pemberton, THA Chief Secretary Kelvin Charles and Tobago East MP the Hon Ayana Webster- Roy. In fact Mr Maharaj in his well-known, call a spade a spade modus operandi was using language derived directly from the work ethic statements issued by these Tobagonian speakers recently.
Continue reading Vilifying the Messenger of Tobago Productivity Message