By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
July 12, 2025

SOONER OR LATER “de chupid” talk was bound to happen. “Cudjoe singing for his supper” and he’s “being paid off with a board appointment”. A PNM sycophant sent me a note: “Singing for your supper. You are no longer a [sic] advocate for poor black people director Cudjoe….Sing, boy, sing. It was never about true [sic] to power but to secure opportunities for yourself. Cudjoe my shame. Africans for sale.”

In other words, one had to be bought off, paid off, or be “singing for your supper” if one opposed a political party that betrayed the trust of its clients. However, black folks did not fall for that bait.

Michael Quamina was on four government boards simultaneously during the last administration—Caribbean Airlines, Trinidad Petroleum Holdings Limited, Petroleum Company of Trinidad and Tobago, and Heritage Petroleum Company.

Newman George also sat on four government boards simultaneously: the Guaracara Refining Company Limited, Trinidad Petroleum Holdings Limited, Paria Fuel Trading Company, and Heritage Petroleum Limited.

One wonders if these gentlemen were singing for their supper or were the natural heirs of these positions. Could it be that their being PNM friends of the former Leader of Our Grief and Continuing Sorrow entitled them to such godly treatment?

Our eminent AG John Jeremie captured such arrogance on the eve of the last election when he told his audience: “The PNM sees itself as the natural party of government.” God, it seems, had ordained it to be so.

The then Leader never respected black people. He referred to troubled black youths as “African hyenas in a jungle” and chastised black people who openly supported the UNC. He characterised them as having lost “their cotton-picking minds” for doing so.

Cotton was the foundation of the Industrial Revolution. It was “primarily responsible for the enslavement of four million African Americans.” (Gene Dattel, Cotton and Race in the Making of America). Karl Marx wrote: “Without slavery, you have no cotton; without cotton, you have no modern industry.”

The then Leader did not understand the role cotton played in the making of black Americans. He felt that black Trinbagonians were crazy or mentally unstable to vote for the UNC. He could not envisage black and brown people coming together to overthrow the modern burden of PNM serfdom. They had to lose their cotton-picking minds to arrive at such a realisation.

The Leader weighed into Jeremie as if he were a common criminal: “He was a dog in the PNM before, and you all can’t call him that, I can call him that…That is the person who the UNC would collect and put on a platform to tell the country that things so bad here that the only salvation in this country is to vote for the UNC.” (Guardian, April 19).

Trinbagonians listened to Jeremie and the UNC. They voted unanimously to remove this foul-mouthed man and his party from office.

Stuart Young, the then Leader’s hand-picked replacement, accused the “Mother of our Nation” of going into the parliamentary bathroom “to zammie”, as Colm Imbert applauded heartily. Young regretted that such “cross-talk unnecessarily distracted public discourse”. Not one PNM parliamentarian condemned Young’s public nastiness.

This Squatter PM called the learned AG “a dunce” in Parliament (June 18). A man who had achieved little before he became an MP, but had the gumption to call a university law professor “a dunce”.

The public rejected the PNM’s nastiness en masse on April 28. A reconstituted UNC, under the dynamic leadership of the “Mother of the Nation”, has expanded and diversified its membership and begun to lay out its policies.

The AG oversaw a popular amendment to the PM Pension Act that deprived the Squatter PM of about $50 million of his lifetime. The Government has proposed a chancellor of the Judiciary to lighten the work of the CJ; is reorganising CEPEP; improving the Life Fund for Sick Children; plans to increase the legal drinking age to 21 years; and plans to disallow gambling and ganja smoking by people under 25 years of age.

This UNC multiracial vision of the society was on display when Sean Sobers, our black Foreign Minister, entered PM Narendra Modi’s airplane to welcome him to T&T while the “Mother of our Nation” and our AG, a black man, greeted him after he descended onto our soil. Jeremie observed: “The UNC has replaced the PNM as the vehicle of conscience for progressive-thinking African and Indian citizens.”

Such a scenario confirmed the biblical prophecy that says: “The stone which the builders refused [has] become the head stone of the corner.” (Psalm 118). Bob Marley puts it more clearly: “The stone that the builder refuse / Will always be the head cornerstone.” (“Corner Stone”).

Foolish statements about people singing for their supper are empty and denigrating. They serve no useful purpose. We should delete them from our political discourse.