By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
July 19, 2025

One wonders if Penny Beckles, her happy band of warriors, and Marvin Gonzales, her re-engineered rottweiler, understand the essence of democracy and the implications of an anticipated redistribution of our country’s population numbers in 2030. They promise to wage a gallant battle on behalf of the CEPEP workers, but all I see is “hate, bitterness, acrimony, animosity,…[people] out of control …[and] acting as raging bulls”. (Express, October 21, 2009).

At Beetham Gardens Community Centre on July 3, Beckles lauded the work CEPEP has done at home and abroad. She says she and “her party are prepared to fight for workers, for contractors…to ensure that justice at all costs exists in Trinidad and Tobago” (Express, July 12).

Dr Amery Browne joined his colleagues in defending our democracy. He accused the UNC of attacking “pillars of our democracy…and all who believe in the Constitution of Trinidad and Tobago and those who uphold the rule of law”. He declared his “sincere, deep, and personal respect” for CEPEP workers “who perform honest work for an honest dollar” (Express, June 12).

Although Beckles and Browne continue to beat their chests in righteous indignation, they forgot to use their rhetorical firepower when their party raised their parliamentary salaries by 29%, and granted the former Leader of Our Grief and Sorrow a 47% wage increase, even as they sought to deny a pension to any senior citizen who had more than $25,000. None of these brave warriors who are now expressing their disdain at the suspension of CEPEP dissented from the position their leaders took..

Not content with this newly found empathy for the poor, they have escalated their attacks against the composition of State boards. The re-engineered rottweiler complains that when he looks at the boards, he thinks he is “living in Bangladesh or Delhi”.

The next day the Guardian reported that after careful fact-checking, “the outgoing boards under the People’s National Movement (PNM) to the newly-appointed boards under the United National Congress (UNC)…revealed little evidence to support Gonzales’s assertion of ethnic imbalance being unique to the new administration. Instead, it showed that the UNC has largely replicated the PNM’s approach—appointing boards that reflect its political support base” (Guardian, July 18).

Guardian Media revealed the ethnic composition of NGC, UDeCOTT, WASA, TSTT, and T&TEC boards to demonstrate PNM’s African-based biases in choosing their boards.

On June 20, 2018, in the third of eight articles, “Preparing the Way for Kamla”, I wrote: “In July 2017, the CIA World Factbook estimated that the population of T&T consisted of East Indians at 35.4% of the population; Africans 34.2%; Mixed 15.3; Mixed Africans/East Indian, 7.7%. The 2017 revision of the “World Population Prospects” estimated that our total population was 1,364,962 in 2016 (“Preparing the Way for Kamla,” Part 3).

I sent Stanley S Chang and Zhiqing (Peter) Chen, mathematics professor at Wellesley College and William Paterson University, New Jersey, respectively, T&T’s census figures from 1946 onward and asked them to project the ethnic make-up of T&T’s population in 2030.

Based on linear regression modelling, Chang estimated that by 2030, the Indian population would grow to 588,000 (or 40.5%); Africans to 525,000 (a decrease from 36.3 to 36.1%); and the mixed group of 339,000 (a decrease from 24.2 to 23.4%). Chen projected that Indians would grow to 775,977 (40.8%); Africans to 614,911 (32.3%); and the mixed group to 417,065 (21.9%.)

Each scholar saw the Indian population growing; Africans and the mixed races as remaining static. Africans will remain a minority while the influx of Venezuelans, Chinese, and other immigrants may change the mixed group population.

If the engineered rottweiler survives until 2030, he may think that he is living in Bangladesh, India, or Pakistan for the simple reason that there will be more Indo-Trinbagonians than Afro-Trinbagonians in this country.

Those who condemn “the wicked actions” of the present Government ought to remember Plato’s warning: “Democracies collapse when citizens become so obsessed with freedom that they resent the slightest application of control as intolerable tyranny.” (Joseph Crespo, Financial Times, July 12). Doing whatever one feels like doing or writing (licence), is likely to bring democracies to “a risky [political] crossroads”.

Although we wish to be fiercely loyal to our constituents, we should not allow ourselves to make silly racist remarks nor should we be unmindful of future realities. We should walk proudly into the future, together.