By Raffique Shah
August 16, 2025

I hope I am mistaken, that I have purged myself of the spirit of the sugar industry that came with the first colonisers and all but strangled Trinidad and Tobago’s economy for many years. I am not ungrateful, mark you, for what sugar has given us by way of revenues and opportunities and “solid, liquid cash”, according to Mastana Bahar’s hosts. But its contribution to the wealth of the nation may well have been close to zilch when one considers the number of times it lost money, wrecked people’s savings, and left the country in a state of disaster.

Now I know many of you will say I am talking crap, that I am not making sense: how can a commodity as sweet as sugar seldom turn a profit, yet become a haven and refuge for corrupt politicians? It was precisely because of its entry onto the national revenue income and profits columns that we saw its uglier side.

By the time the PM won back power earlier this year, the sugar industry in every way had collapsed and was dead. The few workers and farmers who earned their living from the grass (yes, sugar cane is a grass) had switched to a greener and healthier option.

Seriously, though, I know many of you may have never seen the accounts of a company like Caroni Ltd which was once one of the biggest sugar companies in this part of the world. What was alarming is it was not the only sugar company to fail spectacularly.

We know, for example, the state-of-the-art iron and steel company at Pt Lisas—that was constructed by one State-owned company and operated by another—plunged to its death in the murky waters of that harbour after the biggest steel companies in the world, which are Indian-owned (Essar, Tata, Mittal), attempted to keep them afloat.

I’m sure when the PM arranged her land lease fiesta last week in South Trinidad, she thought she was making a positive intervention by giving leases to cane farmers and sugar workers who were forced out of employment or business as Caroni ground to a halt around the turn of the 21st century.

She will have known a lot about how an industry as big as that would collapse, because most of her life she spent in cane-farming and sugar-working communities. She will have known, too, that those who were once a very productive people had then joined the ranks of people who go to work but do not necessarily work. Simply put, they had poor work ethic.

This malaise did not affect only Trinidad and Tobago or the Caribbean: the decline of the great industrial powers in Europe and the rise of South-East Asia (Japan, Korea, Indonesia, etc) heralded new global economic orders.

Here at home, the laziness gripped many hitherto productive workers. State-owned industries and services employees in particular found a way of getting wages and salaries and other benefits without having to labour for them. The sugar industry had only one difference from its competitors: its roots were directly in slavery and indentureship. The descendants of these mainly African and Indian slaves and indentured workers still held these menial jobs.

The face of organised labour, however, had changed. Now, militants such as Tubal Uriah “Buzz” Butler and Adrian Cola Rienzi (Krishna Deonarine) were leaders who fought on behalf of people, who in some cases were still arriving as indentured workers from India and descendants of slaves from up the islands. They were just a generation behind actual slaves.

I have neither the space nor time to get into how and why up to approximately 30,000 sugar and oil workers could simultaneously become militant, who worked hard enough just to earn a wage and the title “wage slave”.

Their stories span two world wars, many other anti-colonial struggles and industrial unrest that would shape the new face of labour: that was the Butler-Rienzi era. It started at the turn of the 20th century and continues to this day, with pale imitations of leaders such as Butler championing one cause or another.

PM Kamla Persad-Bissessar, because of the political path she took, has inherited—besides a political party (ULF/UNC)—a huge trade union formerly led by Basdeo Panday. It was the changing of the guard when leaders like PM Kamla and others who never led so much as a militant meeting, far less a march that defied public order laws, inherited the folding-up of the diminishing membership of unions, and inevitably their demise.

I am not suggesting for one moment that what PM Kamla achieved by way of leased lands for sugar and cane workers was “small ting”. In fact, I commend her for carrying that struggle the final mile it was to take.