By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
December 28, 2024
Three recent events cemented in my mind that the poor and the not-so-poor will suffer much more over the next five years than they do today if the present Government is not changed.
The PNM must move aside to allow us to inhale a new breath of freedom, experience greater competence in running the country’s affairs, and to assure us that we can expect a more normal life in the future.
Continue reading Vote out the PNM
By Raffique Shah
December 28, 2024
The world is what it is.
Having stolen one of Vidia Naipaul’s more thought-provoking opening phrases, frankly I don’t feel guilty. I do not believe I stole anything from VS. I’m sure he has quoted or fallen back on many a Trinidadian writer for original material to start his considerable portfolio of novels that made him famous. “The world is what it is” is as powerful a line as Dante Alighieri’s “Abandon all Hope, ye who enter here” in his 14th-century narrative poem, “The Divine Comedy”.
Continue reading Put books in prisons
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
December 09, 2024
In this version of democracy, the Cabinet rules supreme, to hell with those people who elected them.
Eric Williams began his address to the Second Congress of Negro Writers and Artists Conference in Rome in 1959 by quoting African intellectual Alioune Diop, who said: “There can be no people without a culture. But what we often lose sight of is the natural link between the political and the cultural…It’s the State that guarantees a culture’s memory of its traditions and the nature of its personality.”
Continue reading Rejecting illusions
By Raffique Shah
December 09, 2024
This global imbalance of trade can explain why so many countries that have productive land can never break into the markets.
Trinidad is what it was 50 years ago, a society fashioned in the image and likeness of the giant to our north, where more democracy can be found in the big toe of a communist than it can be anywhere in the United States of America. This is a country that tells the rest of the world how they must behave to survive. It preaches democracy but practices autocracy. It rules the world with an iron fist, imposing punishing sanctions on others, and it will do everything to wreck countries that dare to defy its rule.
Continue reading Colonial roots of hyperinflation
By Raffique Shah
December 04, 2024
I expect a bruising political year ahead of us as general election 2025 looms large. The Opposition United National Congress (UNC) has never really stopped campaigning since their loss in 2015. The margins of victory—the ruling People’s National Movement (PNM) polled in 2015 and 2020—were close enough to keep the PNM uneasy, but the UNC probably blew it by turning to the courts in constituencies where they were behind by relatively small numbers of votes, causing them to lose goodwill among the electorate.
Continue reading No need for wars
By Raffique Shah
November 27, 2024
Trinidad was a bountiful island. It once was almost self-sufficient in food production. Its economy for the past 50 years has been reliant on its oil, gas and petrochemicals. To truly understand how close we came to being a gem of a country, citizens of today need to know that during the Second World War (1939-1945), when we had no choice but to produce and consume more food than we could eat, we did it.
Continue reading Not culture, dis is madness
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
November 12, 2024
It was November 2016; the PNM had just won an election, and it was riding high. At a conference hosted by the Government and the International Monetary Fund, Finance Minister Colm Imbert explained why he had raised the price of fuel. He boasted: “I increased the price of fuel by 15% and then realised that was not enough. I came back again in April and raised it by another 15% and I came back again just a few weeks ago and raised it by another 15%. They haven’t rioted yet.” (Loop News, November 9, 2016.)
Continue reading Hubris goes before the fall
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
November 05, 2024
It may seem an exaggeration, but the Leader of Our Grief is the most obnoxious leader we have had in our 62 years of independent rule. He has revealed himself as an unsophisticated bully who is unaware of his social and political responsibilities to the nation.
His latest display of incivility was wrapped up in a perfumed package of royal pomp and circumstance. He boasted that after having had dinner with King Charles III, Mia Mottley of Barbados, King Mswati of Eswatini, and President Irfaan Ali of Guyana he discovered that the UNC and its leaders had criticised the person he had selected to turn our economy around. He called his critics “the most destructive, unpatriotic louts among us”.
Continue reading The ultimate barbarian
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
October 23, 2024
Two weeks ago, I responded to Nigel Seenathsingh’s letter that appeared in the Express. I wrote: “When I warned…about the dangers inherent in the Leader of Our Grief’s statements about women, I was not trying to demonise him or Stuart Young. I was only alerting my readers to be on guard about the violence against women [I emphasised women] that exists in our society and the role that language plays in this regard.”
Continue reading Language matters
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
October 16, 2024
After the People’s National Movement came into power in 1956, Eric Williams took an inordinate length of time (sometimes as much as three hours) to deliver his budget speeches. He used them to reach his fellow citizens since the means of communication were not as widely available as they are today. It was also a way to expand the democratic process.
Today we live in an era of Facebook and TikTok. It is anachronistic for a minister of finance to spend five hours delivering a budget speech. It reflects an attitude of someone living in the past.
Continue reading The leader’s schizophrenic behaviour