By Raffique Shah
September o4, 2021
No state of emergency, lift the curfew and let’s get back to normal. We are fed up with Covid-19, 20 or whatever edition or variant is stalking us. No more. Time to show this beast just what Trinis are capable of. We will beat him to death with ‘wining’ and ‘jamming’, drinking puncheon rum. Release the Trini beast, Mr Prime Minister, and we shall show the world how to fight Covid, David, any id.
Continue reading Catapult, club and a bullpistle
By Raffique Shah
August 30, 2021
If I were asked to put a human face to a new portrait of Trinidad and Tobago at age 59, I would sketch a decrepit Jean or Dinah, aged beyond her actual years, scowling and regretting her wasted years, waiting to die at the feet of an ungrateful people.
I am not happy conjuring such a sorry image of my native land at a point in its history when it should be bubbling with life, oozing confidence and full of energy befitting a nation that has had a good run, whatever obstacles it may have encountered after it became an independent nation on August 31, 1962.
Continue reading T&T at 59: Jean or Dinah?
By Raffique Shah
August 08, 2021
If you think you cannot possibly get any angrier over the state of sports in the country, what with the annihilation of Team TTO at the Tokyo Olympics, our cricket teams performing way below what is expected of them, and our once-proud football team booted out of World Cup 2026 by some miniscule islands, then read the local football legend’s recently published Everald Gally Cummings, The Autobiography.
Continue reading Sports overlords must be made to account
By Dr Keith Rowley
Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago
August 01, 2021 – Facebook
Happy Emancipation Day to all the people of Trinidad and Tobago, from the Government, my own family and myself on the occasion of Emancipation Day 2021.
Today, we recognise not just the horrific experience of our African ancestors – but the impact it continues to have on the lives of millions of their descendants.
Continue reading Dr Keith Rowley’s Emancipation Day Statement
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
August 01, 2021
PART 1
The masters were “dam tief”, the Governor an “old rogue”, and the King not such a fool as to buy them half free when he was rich enough to pay for them altogether.
—Port of Spain Gazette, August 5, 1834
Today is Emancipation Day. Ashton Ford, one of our respected elders, remembers the impetus that led former prime minister George Chambers to change the Discovery Day holiday (a day that recognised the misdeeds of our oppressors) to Emancipation Day that honours the achievements of our ancestors.
Chambers believed if you named your streets and monuments after local patriots, you encouraged a sense of nationhood and strengthened national identity among the population.
Continue reading Glorious day(s) of the happy and the free
By Raffique Shah
August 01, 2021
Fact: an overwhelming majority of the 1,000-plus victims of Covid-19 who died of the highly contagious virus were also stricken with non-communicable diseases (NCDs), such as heart diseases, diabetes, renal conditions and other preventable ailments.
I do not have the precise numbers of such cases since the Ministry of Health has a policy of not disclosing details of patients in its system. But I think I can safely say that based on the frequency with which “co-morbidities” has been attached to the profiles of the deceased, some 80 per cent fell in that category.
Continue reading The answers my friends
By Errol Pilgrim
July 25, 2021 – trinidadexpress.com
John Doe is not a government minister, neither is he head of any government department.
Mr Doe is among the thousands of ordinary workers in the public service entitled by law to tax-exempt purchases of motor cars.
Like his counterparts in other statutory bodies and throughout the public service, Doe is a travelling officer entitled – pandemic or no pandemic – to motor-car tax exemptions and a travelling allowance.
Continue reading Car exemption hypocrisy
By Stephen Kangal
July 25, 2021
The ill-advised, overtly hurried and premature introduction into Parliament of the two completely new Bills on June 28 last on the long-festering granting of autonomy/self-governance to Tobago prior to and without conducting the requisite inter-active consultations with the Tobago constituency of principal stakeholders by the PNM was a deliberate, deceptive, nefarious, dishonest and calculated politically -conceptualised strategy to shelve the Tobago issue.
Continue reading PNM’s Political Strategy To Deny Tobago Self-Governance
By Stephen Kangal, CARONI
July 19, 2021
While hampers are in high demand and par for the course of alleviating abject poverty today, Tobago after twenty-five years of civilised persistence for attaining genuine self-government and functional autonomy (2018 Bill) is being presented with a misleading hamper of Bills even though Tobago is politically well-endowed.
Tobagonians must submit themselves to that pittance irrespective of the extent to which these Bills have deviated from responding to their hitherto well-articulated legitimate expectations.
Continue reading Tobago Does Not Need this Self Government Bills Hamper
By Raffique Shah
July 19, 2021
Every so often, and since Covid-19 struck, maybe all too often reporters in the mainstream media assail us with heart-rending stories of families living in abject poverty—you know the kind: mother with three-to-ten urchin-like children, no resident father or no explanation of his or their absence, crammed into a dilapidated shack that looks like it will collapse if you sneezed in it; the little faces staring into the cameras are poster-images for strife and famine in some God-forsaken distant land; and the cries are always the same… my children will starve to death… if only I had a house… no, I can’t afford to send them to school… we need food, clothes, books, electricity… and so on.
Continue reading Make poverty a punishable crime