{"id":56375,"date":"2025-07-26T22:40:36","date_gmt":"2025-07-27T02:40:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/?p=56375"},"modified":"2025-07-26T22:40:36","modified_gmt":"2025-07-27T02:40:36","slug":"the-rottweilers-revenge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/?p=56375","title":{"rendered":"The Rottweiler\u2019s Revenge"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
\nJuly 19, 2025<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Dr.<\/a>One wonders if Penny Beckles, her happy band of warriors, and Marvin Gonzales, her re-engineered rottweiler, understand the essence of democracy and the implications of an anticipated redistribution of our country\u2019s population numbers in 2030. They promise to wage a gallant battle on behalf of the CEPEP workers, but all I see is \u201chate, bitterness, acrimony, animosity,\u2026[people] out of control \u2026[and] acting as raging bulls\u201d. (Express, October 21, 2009).
\n
\nAt Beetham Gardens Community Centre on July 3, Beckles lauded the work CEPEP has done at home and abroad. She says she and \u201cher party are prepared to fight for workers, for contractors…to ensure that justice at all costs exists in Trinidad and Tobago\u201d (Express, July 12).<\/p>\n

Dr Amery Browne joined his colleagues in defending our democracy. He accused the UNC of attacking \u201cpillars of our democracy\u2026and all who believe in the Constitution of Trinidad and Tobago and those who uphold the rule of law\u201d. He declared his \u201csincere, deep, and personal respect\u201d for CEPEP workers \u201cwho perform honest work for an honest dollar\u201d (Express, June 12).<\/p>\n

Although Beckles and Browne continue to beat their chests in righteous indignation, they forgot to use their rhetorical firepower when their party raised their parliamentary salaries by 29%, and granted the former Leader of Our Grief and Sorrow a 47% wage increase, even as they sought to deny a pension to any senior citizen who had more than $25,000. None of these brave warriors who are now expressing their disdain at the suspension of CEPEP dissented from the position their leaders took..<\/p>\n

Not content with this newly found empathy for the poor, they have escalated their attacks against the composition of State boards. The re-engineered rottweiler complains that when he looks at the boards, he thinks he is \u201cliving in Bangladesh or Delhi\u201d.<\/p>\n

The next day the Guardian reported that after careful fact-checking, \u201cthe outgoing boards under the People\u2019s National Movement (PNM) to the newly-appointed boards under the United National Congress (UNC)…revealed little evidence to support Gonzales\u2019s assertion of ethnic imbalance being unique to the new administration. Instead, it showed that the UNC has largely replicated the PNM\u2019s approach—appointing boards that reflect its political support base\u201d (Guardian, July 18).<\/p>\n

Guardian Media revealed the ethnic composition of NGC, UDeCOTT, WASA, TSTT, and T&TEC boards to demonstrate PNM\u2019s African-based biases in choosing their boards.<\/p>\n

On June 20, 2018, in the third of eight articles, \u201cPreparing the Way for Kamla\u201d, I wrote: \u201cIn July 2017, the CIA World Factbook estimated that the population of T&T consisted of East Indians at 35.4% of the population; Africans 34.2%; Mixed 15.3; Mixed Africans\/East Indian, 7.7%. The 2017 revision of the \u201cWorld Population Prospects\u201d estimated that our total population was 1,364,962 in 2016 (\u201cPreparing the Way for Kamla,\u201d Part 3).<\/p>\n

I sent Stanley S Chang and Zhiqing (Peter) Chen, mathematics professor at Wellesley College and William Paterson University, New Jersey, respectively, T&T\u2019s census figures from 1946 onward and asked them to project the ethnic make-up of T&T\u2019s population in 2030.<\/p>\n

Based on linear regression modelling, Chang estimated that by 2030, the Indian population would grow to 588,000 (or 40.5%); Africans to 525,000 (a decrease from 36.3 to 36.1%); and the mixed group of 339,000 (a decrease from 24.2 to 23.4%). Chen projected that Indians would grow to 775,977 (40.8%); Africans to 614,911 (32.3%); and the mixed group to 417,065 (21.9%.)<\/p>\n

Each scholar saw the Indian population growing; Africans and the mixed races as remaining static. Africans will remain a minority while the influx of Venezuelans, Chinese, and other immigrants may change the mixed group population.<\/p>\n

If the engineered rottweiler survives until 2030, he may think that he is living in Bangladesh, India, or Pakistan for the simple reason that there will be more Indo-Trinbagonians than Afro-Trinbagonians in this country.<\/p>\n

Those who condemn \u201cthe wicked actions\u201d of the present Government ought to remember Plato\u2019s warning: \u201cDemocracies collapse when citizens become so obsessed with freedom that they resent the slightest application of control as intolerable tyranny.\u201d (Joseph Crespo, Financial Times, July 12). Doing whatever one feels like doing or writing (licence), is likely to bring democracies to \u201ca risky [political] crossroads\u201d.<\/p>\n

Although we wish to be fiercely loyal to our constituents, we should not allow ourselves to make silly racist remarks nor should we be unmindful of future realities. We should walk proudly into the future, together.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe July 19, 2025 One wonders if Penny Beckles, her happy band of warriors, and Marvin Gonzales, her re-engineered rottweiler, understand the essence of democracy and the implications of an anticipated redistribution of our country\u2019s population numbers in 2030. They promise to wage a gallant battle on behalf of the CEPEP … Continue reading The Rottweiler\u2019s Revenge<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,30,7,142],"tags":[60,171,49],"class_list":["post-56375","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-tt","category-pnm","category-politics","category-unc","tag-keith-rowley","tag-selwyn-r-cudjoe","tag-tt-govt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56375","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=56375"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56375\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56376,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56375\/revisions\/56376"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56375"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}