By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
August 16, 2025

I wish to remind UNC detractors that the term “revolution” denotes the overthrow of an old order and replacing it with a new system of governance. Sometimes a revolution is violent, sometimes it’s peaceful. Whatever form it takes, it involves changing the social and economic order, repudiating how things were done previously, and delineating what it hopes to accomplish in the future.

Eric Williams, the Father of Our Nation, did a similar thing in 1956 after he defeated the parties that supported the old colonial regime, as he clamoured for a bicameral rather than a unicameral legislature. In 1955, he sent a petition on constitution reform to Alan Lennox-Boyd, secretary of state for the colonies:

“We, the people of Trinidad and Tobago…find ourselves at the crossroads of our constitutional history. Behind us lies the donkey tract of colonialism which we have travelled for 150 years. Ahead of us lies the road of responsible government which we feel ourselves mature and courageous enough to negotiate at this stage of our destiny.” (Hamid Ghany, “Eric Williams: The Constitutional Scholar…”)

Williams’s petition, which gained 27,811 signatures, caused “some consternation in the ranks of local colonial authorities, and was viewed with even greater alarm in London” (Ghany). Lennox-Boyd conceded: “This impressive memorial [petition] is at least as much a personal testimony to the regard in which Dr Eric Williams is held as to the intrinsic worth of the proposal.”

After Kamla Persad-Bissessar, the Mother of Our Nation (hereafter “The Mother”) defeated the PNM in 2025, she realised our country reached another stage in our political development that calls for a revolutionary approach to governance.

She adopted UNC’s manifesto as Government policy in keeping with the promises she made to the nation. At the Monday Night Report on August 11 she laid out her ideological position.

She told everyone what a revolutionary practice entailed; that she would not accept any malfeasance in her Government; and reminded her ministers:

“You seem to have already forgotten the loyal rank-and-file UNC people who worked hard to put you in office…

“I will fire you! I will ensure you face the courts!

“If you continue to pattern that kind of behaviour from the PNM, I’ll go to war with you. I will buss your head.”

Such language was taken from our ancestors’ philosophical wisdom: stickfighting (or Kalinda), an African martial arts tradition Africans brought to Trinidad; and the Kalaripayattu, the ancient martial arts and holistic approach to physical and mental well-being Indians brought from India.

She demanded that we return our gaze to the gayelle and the kalari, the sources from which our political strength emerged.

We can disregard the mindless carping of Stuart Young, Marvin Gonzales, Pennelope Beckles and Faris Al-Rawi, an unconscious blob of people, who are intent on looking backward.

They should remember that Lot’s wife turned into a pillar of salt when she continued to look back and that it took PNM 3,500 days to create the political and social mess in which we find ourselves.

UNC is a people-oriented party that is grounded in the bowels of the wretched of the earth. The Mother will not tolerate members of the elite walking into a minister’s office, dropping a paper on her desk, and outlining how he will defraud a nation.

Nor is the Mother inclined to accept the fate prescribed for our poor African brothers who have been assigned the task of being perpetual grass cutters while CEPEP contractors bilk the country out of millions of dollars.

These dastardly practices consign our brothers and sisters to another form of servitude.

In one of his most savage assaults against colonialism, Williams proclaimed: “Massa day done, Sahib day done.” He explained: “Massa is not a racial term. Massa is the symbol of a bygone age. Massa day is a social phenomenon: Massa day done connotes a political awakening and a social revolution.”

The Mother sought to convey a similar message last Monday night. She wanted to join forces with her revolutionary citizens who believe things cannot continue to go as they have been going for the last ten years. She warned: “I will buss yo’ head if you continue.”

The Mother was grounding with her brothers and sisters in a similar manner in which Walter Rodney grounded with his black brethren whom he defined as “the hundreds of millions of people whose homelands are in Asia and Africa, with another few millions in the Americas”. (The Groundings with My Brothers.)

“Straight talk is bad manners.” It’s the necessary stimulus one requires to jolt our population out of its complacency.

NOTE: This is the last time my column will appear in this space. I thank my readers and editor Omatie Lyder for granting me the pleasure of being part of the ‘Express’ family.