By Dr. Selwyn R. Cudjoe
November 27, 2007
The main problem with Professor Hamid Ghany’s analysis (“Prepare for Constitutional Debate,” Guardian, Nov. 18, 2007) is that it fails to take the views of ordinary people into consideration and leaves East Indians out of the constitutional debate for which he wishes to prepare us. Professor Ghany extols the wisdom of Major Wood and argues that “the whole history of the African population of the West Indies inevitably drives them towards representative institutions fashioned after the British model.” If he wishes to cite historical examples to clarify African agency and the struggle for representative government there is no sound reasons why he could not go back to the Baptist War in Jamaica (1831); Daaga uprising in Trinidad (1837); or the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica (1865). If he wanted to take an inter-racial perspective-after all we live in an interracial society-he could have gone back the major Indian panchayat in Tacarigua in 1899 when East Indians rescued the leadership of their group from John Morton and signaled their independence. Trinbagonians have always rejected authoritarian rule and spoke up for themselves.
Continue reading It’s Not Only a Black Thing?
The avalanche of criticisms that slammed into National Security Minister Martin Joseph and his protective services chiefs after their media briefing last week was not only predictable, but, necessary. Here’s a country in the vice-like grip of a crime clinch that seems to come from a mutant octopus, and there were the minister and his chiefs saying: no worries! Well, not quite. But their apparent insensitivity to the mayhem that has engulfed the nation, the fear that most people live with, every minute, every day, only served to infuriate the population.
NEKEISHA Noel was breathless, shaking, excited. 
In the rest of the civilised world politics is the art of the possible and of compromise. In T&T it degenerated in 2007 into a fine art of naked UNC deception that caused some 190,000 unsuspecting people to be so manipulated that they bought into it with their rustic innocence and hero worship of a badly scarred leader.
