By Raffique Shah
November 23, 2025

It would later be branded “The Summer of Discontent”, a period during which the temperature and humidity of the island-state rose to intolerable levels, where natives and tourists alike walked around saturated in sweat. Tensions in the society rose to threatening heights. It was as if the population would implode with a fierceness that had never been seen before. Yet, nothing like that happened. Seething in sweat-driven fury, the natives wore their discontent with stoic harmony, leaving a façade of happiness that belied the building hate that will consume this country, someday, someday.
Continue reading Government boots →

By Raffique Shah
November 15, 2025

When crimino­logist Daurius Figueira speaks to us citizens on drug trafficking, murder and other crimes related to them, we’d better listen.

You see, much unlike Donald Trump, the President of the United States of America, who sees the narcotics trade in the world as nothing more than a board game, Daurius knows and has studied the innards of the drug trade. He has witnessed the savagery of the wars by overlords for control of the cocaine market internationally. The Pablo Escobars of Latin America, in the relatively short time that they controlled their base in Central and South America, reduced large Latin American nations to nothing more than a gangster’s paradise—which they fought Washington and the American government with to stamp their control over crime and politics.
Continue reading No mandate for war →

By Raffique Shah
November 01, 2025

As I watched and listened to television news focused on the unfolding story about the massacre of hundreds of Brazilians in the slum city of Rio de Janeiro in a war against gangs and drug dealers and traffickers. I recoiled in horror when I realised this was happening in real time.

Here was I, veteran campaigner against cruel and unusual punishment and harsh actions against a people, almost enjoying these savage images of hundreds of mainly young suspected criminals/gang members and drug traffickers, and sundry crooks caught in the cross-fire. I alerted my friends to the report which we paid attention to diligently until someone asked: Is this in Sudan or the Congo?
Continue reading Greedy Colonisers →

By Raffique Shah
October 18, 2025

At first, I thought I had completed a full circle. You see, I was just about ten years old when I got a notion of what a full circle was: you just go around, and around. In my 80th year I am seeing a full circle with the “make-work programme” that had started out as the Prime Minister’s “special works” programme with much fanfare. I had learnt of it in the newspaper which my father bought ritually every Sunday morning.
Continue reading The first circle →

By Raffique Shah
October 04, 2025

As a columnist who has written a weekly piece in one or more popular newspapers for at least 45 years, I know that I’ve reached my limit when the person who is helping me type the 800 words I am allowed is my daughter: she was in diapers back in 1981 and I used to occasionally shout at her when I tried to concentrate or focus, and now I am in diapers—more out of caution than need.

But knowing that, I have arrived at the point in my life when I can no longer say “that column is mine”, my views and only mine.
Continue reading Death before retirement →

By Raffique Shah
September 13, 2025

As I move along slowly towards what will be, if I make it, my 80th year on this here earth, mostly I feel as if I am not relevant to what’s happening around me. There was a time when I would easily sit behind my laptop and write up very sound, must-read columns that my many fans would call in to cuss or kiss me over, depending not so much on what was written but how it was written.
Continue reading TTT, Goebbels, and geriatrics →