By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
May 28, 2024
Anyone who believes the PNM Government will solve the problem of black underdevelopment, joblessness, and criminality in the depressed areas of the island had better think again. It will not happen in the near future. The elites who have taken over the party have no interest in these problems, they do not have the will to solve them, nor the intelligence to know the difference.
Continue reading The importance of work
By Raffique Shah
May 28, 2024
The Commissioner of Police, Mrs Erla Christopher, should be least surprised when an avalanche of criticisms rolled in her direction, threatening to bury her, when in other circumstances, she should have celebrated her re-appointment to lead the Police Service for another year beyond the mandatory retirement age.
After all, here’s a woman who has spent all of her adult life being a police officer, likely as a constable initially and working her way up the ranks over many years. In the face of insults hurled at her, members of the public need to understand how she must feel offended. Her righteous indignation, however, has in turn angered a population that is drowning in a wave of crime that has now spread to almost every part of the country, that she and her 6,000 or 8,000 or however many officers are battling—a beast that seems to have extraordinary power, money, guns, and tentacles.
Continue reading God help us
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
May 21, 2024
Question: Would you select someone to lead a company or an organisation where, previously, that person had failed in that position and shows no sign of improving his/her leadership skills or comprehending the job-challenges that lie ahead?
This question arose last week when National Security Minister Fitzgerald Hinds explained why his Government retained Erla Christopher to lead the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service for another year even as crime and disorder worsen and every sign suggests they will get “worserer.”
Continue reading Normalising failure and callousness
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
May 14, 2024
In 1985 I interviewed the president of the South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO) Sam Nujoma when he visited the United Nations Decolonisation Committee to plead for his country’s independence (West Africa, present-day Namibia). Namibia was a German colony from the 1880s to the First World War when South African troops occupied its territory.
From 1904 to 1908, the Germans waged a war that exterminated over 100,000 Africans from the Herero and Nama ethnic groups. It was deemed the first holocaust of the 20th century. In 1920, the League of Nations allowed South Africa to administer the territory.
Continue reading Africa’s holocaust
By Raffique Shah
May 14, 2024
If the two leading parties, the PNM and the UNC, ignore my challenge for them to make corruption a focal point of the next general election, would this be to their detriment? The answer is no. They will have read my column, of course, and they would be intimately aware that I was correct in everything I wrote in matters relating to racketeering and other very high-level illegal transactions.
I will not, of course, have documents or files to support my allegations. Which means, as a citizen, I do not have the liberty to pursue such matters the way good journalists do. So, if at all any of them wishes to comment, to brand my recommendations for an issue-related elections period, they would have the whole country laughing at me, making me look like an idiot. They, too, will not only lampoon me but they will come after me for whatever pennies I have amassed.
Continue reading Destination, purgatory
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
May 07, 2024
From New York to Los Angeles, from New Hampshire to Texas, thousands of students have risen up against how the Palestinian people in Gaza are being treated. US police have arrested over 2,300 student protesters, and many more will be arrested in the coming weeks. We should congratulate the moral courage of these students.
Edward Luce reminds Americans about their foolhardiness. He wrote: “America is in knots over the foolishness—or worse—of its campus protesters. But it is the adults who are making the biggest dunces of themselves. The role of the grown-ups facing student unrest is to keep the peace without sacrificing rights. These include free speech and physical safety. The task requires principled consistency.” (Financial Times, May 2.)
Continue reading Student outrage over US behaviour
By Raffique Shah
May 07, 2024
However lofty the ideals they may shout from the rooftops, when you get down to base, when you reach the gutter where most of them reside, politics is not about ideals. It is about naked power.
Jean-Paul Sartre, French philosopher, wrote in his masterful introduction to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth: They bring nothing new, they create nothing new, they simply regurgitate what their masters fill in their heads. Centuries after the great intellects introduced them to concepts such as democracy, you can hear them in the ex-colonies, now independent states, screaming as if they invented the words, “Government of the people, for the people and by the people”; “Liberty! Equality! Fraternity!”
Continue reading Living to steal another day