By Raffique Shah
March 14, 2026

We citizens—I think I can safely say the majority among us—have never given up fighting crime. We never needed any special crime plan. If various pieces of legislation govern the protective services and other institutions, armed forces, Prison Service and the Judiciary in its broadest sense, then why do we need any plan to fight crime?

By simply enforcing the existing laws, those we have been governed by for over a century, we should have complete control over crime. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Even simpler are the laws that govern the everyday functioning of the society with an existing population of just over 1.5 million.
Continue reading Crime soars, justice in a mess →

By Raffique Shah
March 08, 2026

Since everybody who is anybody who has worn a uniform—matters not what arm of the protective services he or she attempted to serve in—has offered advice to every new administration, I felt it incumbent on me to throw in my ten cents’ worth of advice to the beleaguered anti-crime Government that seems to be spinning top in mud, going nowhere, faster or slower.

I can boast that my qualifications for ­offering advice on matters of security date back to when the top cop of the day wore short pants, carried club-like batons, and looked every inch the fearsome badjohn. He had sobriquets, such as the infamous Bag-ah-Lion.
Continue reading Government by the unfit →

By Raffique Shah
February 28, 2026

I do not know if Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar has worked out a plan on how she proposes to write her name in history. Ordinarily, the nature of politics and political rule in the top Caribbean countries, in the region’s relatively short time in global history (600 years recorded since the arrival of the Europeans), does not leave much room for ambitious political figures to write their names as is prevalent in countries whose dated history may be as many as twice that number.
Continue reading PM chases power’s crooked shadow →

By Raffique Shah
February 21, 2026

As they evolve, technologies that we see as wondrous little devices make our lives easier, safer, better. Our elders first benefited from these devices when ideas that we had explored for decades, nay, for centuries, opened windows of opportunities, in instances decades after man first ­explored them.

I don’t know when, for example, man first discovered that he could fly. Yes, fly. ­Imagine, if you would, primitive man perched on a tree’s branch, maybe as a human being or as a bird or insect—and through generations, took the thought of flying from a physical manifestation of a motorised vehicle or aircraft that he was probably daydreaming of when a helicopter-like vehicle embedded ­itself in his brain.
Continue reading So much for a peaceful Caribbean →

By Raffique Shah
February 14, 2026

I don’t know why the average person who gets drawn into conversation or argument withdraws into the safety net of the age-old boundaries of song and dance, and revelry and scholarly epistles. The educated among us are the first to shelter behind banality as they pretend to know much about art forms that, in truth, they know little of.
Continue reading You cannot legislate culture →

By Raffique Shah
January 24, 2026

For sake of country, more than people, I keep hoping the portents of an economic meltdown that stand menacingly watching at Trinidad and Tobago will attempt for yet another time in its history to stave off the doom and gloom that threaten.

In my time, at my age (I’m approaching 80), I have seen God or whatever deity people worship smile at this cussed country and spare us the hardships, gore and misery that other countries face year after year. In my time, born in 1946 as I was, I have watched Trinis “wine” through hurricane, earthquakes, fire, floods and worse, while our neighbours up the Caribbean Sea, in Latin and North America, are bullied and beaten as they face the wrath of God or whoever else directs the show.
Continue reading Country over the unpatriotic →

By Raffique Shah
January 17, 2026

The first time I intervened in Tobago’s politics was in their first Tobago House of Assembly election in 1980. In my innocence, I thought it was a harmless gesture that should have offended no one. This was the latest attempt at constitutional change that should have given the island a greater degree of autonomy, much like self-government.

In the earlier 1976 general election for Trinidad and Tobago, we had reached an agreement of sorts with ANR Robinson’s Democratic Action Congress (DAC) to not contest the two Tobago seats. However, we felt it was necessary that we have a presence in the sister isle.
Continue reading No war over Tobago →

By Raffique Shah
December 20, 2025

It’s perhaps because those were earlier days and easier times when the population could make do with simple things that gave us pleasure and joy to own. Or it could be that most of the population decades ago were relatively poor. But whatever the reason why we did not enjoy the most expensive fruits, foods and things that cost plenty in general did not matter anyway.

One hundred years after the abolition of slavery, when the Africans who came in bondage had settled among their one-time captor in ways that were inconceivable when the British Lion still roared, and now among the world the beast no longer sported the fearsome jaws that made lesser mortals tremble with fear…those people, along with Indians and other orientals—Chinese…they were pursuing their full freedom, nothing less.
Continue reading Battering the Christ Child →