By Raffique Shah
May 23, 2026

The first time I dipped my index finger in electoral ink in my native land was also the first time I voted in any election, and it allowed me to experience one of the more exciting aspects of elections in general—their impact on the politics of a country.

I had been through the voting process for around six elections before I faced the one in 1976. In an uncanny way I found myself, at age four, interacting with a local government candidate whose name was Mandan Dass from Chase Village.

He owned a light aircraft that he used as a marketing tool and he took off and landed on a community recreation ground. I suppose he found that he benefited from the aerial campaigning. He had bundled hundreds of copies of his campaign flyers and threw them from the aircraft. I remember being awestruck by this man and his airplane.

When I look back at it, I feel a sense of pride, that at age four I could understand what Dass was saying and my campaigning for him, not withstanding it being illegal, when I was way too young and underage to understand what was happening.

Mr Dass personally spoke with me and gave me his campaign materials to ­distribute, and even went so far as to ask me to encourage my father to vote for him. I remember Mitra Sinanan and Uriah Butler in later elections campaigning in Freeport, door to door. I plastered the old bicycle that my father had bought me with stickers that simply stated: Vote Sinanan or Vote Butler.

So, yes, I was active in politics long before I had attained the legal age to vote. And, my bike loudly sought support for both Butler and Sinanan. Maybe I was too young to understand the concept of voting and how politics worked, the intricacies they carried, but I was excited and encouraged by candidates.

I knew well when Freeport-ians felt slighted when another candidate distributed “sno-balls and press” (shaved ice in colourful syrup) to them but he gave small packages of ice cream to fair-skinned voters. Later on, my father would take me and my faithful dog, Brown-Boy, to campaign meetings out of the area. It was quite an experience for me as a teenager being exposed to politics from an early age.

How I wish today’s youths would take such an interest in the ballots and not in the bullets like they are currently doing. But I had guidance. I had supportive parents and though the candidates back then were unscrupulous too, I found it easier to discern them from today’s crooked politicians.

As I survey the wastelands of yesteryear, long converted to housing and commercial district with some generous donations to communities, I wonder why the recreation grounds my friends and I, mere infants, lived in, planted on, remain wastelands. Then I know the answers, don’t I?

Promises are made every political campaign. Many are never kept. Many are also fulfilled. The trouble we have in this country, though, is that one political party will undertake a project that the other party, when they come into office, will not fulfil; or, worse, they will leave the structure to become abandoned and we all know what happens to abandoned buildings.

By the time the party that promised the facility makes it back into office, the facility will now require repair and upgrades before it can be commissioned. Basically we “spin top in mud” pointing the finger at each other until there is no one left to blame. That is Trinidad politics for you.

God forbid one party uses a model developed by another party and it actually works. Or better than that, the pigs might fly the day political parties agree off the bat on a crime plan that actually works, without us having to hear in the House when the Speaker asks the Cabinet about yays, nays, and abstentions: you hear the party in office say yay, and the opposing party say either nay or abstain.

You cannot call yourself a patriot if you are unwilling to admit that you are wrong, or you are unwilling to support good plans put forward by the government or good suggestions made by the opposition.

One infamous politician said the role of the opposition is to oppose. If that is the mindset we carry with us today, don’t ask why crime is still rampant or why some energy sector deals have not been fulfilled.

As long as we are politicking for the wrong reasons, which I assure you most politicians are, we will forever be deep in the doo-doo. There will never be a setting aside of differences and just allowing the best interests of the country to prevail. In this cussed land, left to these politicians, the worst will always prevail.