By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
May 10, 2025

Some years ago I wrote of a conversation I had with Aaron St John from East Port of Spain. He spoke about the dilapidated condition of the South East Port Spain Secondary School and its surroundings: “I have been reading your articles for a while and I want to invite you to come and take a look at East Port of Spain where we live. I am 41 years old and was born in this city. It has not changed for all of my life. It remains the same dirty, nasty, undeveloped, unprotected place and it’s only getting worse and more dangerous…

“We have been dealing with this for over 50 years. Some of our grandparents and parents are already dead. Please come and see for yourself and maybe they will listen to you or not but at least you would have done a great deed for your people, the children of slaves…

“Our parents should have fired them [the PNM] a long time ago. Our downfall in town is that we believe in the PNM so much that we accept being deceived by them. For years, we have called evil good. But love has no colour, no gender, no race and the PNM does not show us that love.” (“Black Betrayal”, March 9, 2020.)

A PNM enthusiast claimed that I “invented Aaron St John to carry on my nefarious agenda”. On March 14, 2020, Aaron established his bonafides as a living, breathing person. He wrote: “Our grandparents and parents owned nothing. So Black people children don’t inherit nothing from our parents but an old house, old appliances, and a crime infested community.” (Cudjoe, “Black Betrayal”, March 31, 2020.)

In 2020, journalist Anthony Wilson questioned the propriety of a $1.5 billion bond offering that was given to NCB Global Finance Limited of which Angus Young, the brother of Stuart Young, is the CEO. Wilson noted that the $1.5 billion bond that Young’s brother received “has a term of 20 years and carries a fixed interest rate of 5.74% per annum. That means that the government must pay $86.1 million a year for the next 20 years to the bond holders or a total of $1.722 billion in interest on the life of the bond.” (Express, March 25, 2020.)

“The issues include loans that in its Requests for Proposals for the $1.5 billion bond, the Ministry of Finance may have deviated from established practice by omitting some traditional bidders from the mandate to raise money for the government.” (Express, March 25.)

Between 2018 and 2020, Young recused himself at least five times from Cabinet meetings in which his brother’s company was awarded TT$2.470 billion to arrange loans for the government and other entities (Cabinet Minutes for September 9, 2025 to February 1, 2022.)

On March 9, 2020, Kamla Persad-Bissessar listed the loans (TT$357 million) the government borrowed from Global Finance. She asked: “How is it that a company which has such a small asset base (TT$383 million) is able to loan the Government close to TT$1.5 billion?”

As Global Finance prospered, the conditions of poor people like Aaron worsened. I connected with Aaron on Wednesday. He joined UNC in 2016 after a public servant [her name withheld to protect her privacy] gave him a UNC application. She assisted over 600 people in Laventille, Morvant, Belmont, Port of Spain and Gonzales with housing, access grants, and such things.

I spoke with this public servant on Wednesday. She said: “I am a proud mother of 11 children, born and bred in Laventille. I am a life-long member of the UNC. When I met the honourable lady [meaning Kamla Persad-Bissessar] I was impressed by her personality and her love for people. I kept on her side.”

She was elated at UNC’s victory.

Aaron’s response was different. His was more a psychological and intellectual journey. He said: “The Boss Lady [Kamla] inspires me. She changed my mind about East Indian people. We [meaning UNC] had to win over people in the East-West Corridor. My task was to debate them and put up a good argument about the party because that is where the real contest was: on the bus stop, by the doubles man, on the corner, and on the promenades.”

Aaron said other insightful things. He ended our conversation with the following words: “Kamla changed my life. I will never forget her as long as I live.”

As I spoke with Aaron and the senior public servant, I realised that while PNM glided along blissfully, they never felt the tremor of change beneath their feet. They only knew what hit them when the titanic movement of change interrupted their reverie on April 28. One hopes the PNM will never ever be so blinded by their lyin’ eyes.