Whether you agreed with him, whether you thought his poli­cies were wrong, even if you were on dif­fer­ent sides, it was dif­fi­cult to dis­like Franklin (Frankie) Khan.

I first met the late Frankie Khan in ear­ly 2002. He was at the time cam­paign­ing to be the Mem­ber of Par­lia­ment for the then Or­toire/Ma­yaro con­stituen­cy.

While I have not lived in Rio Claro since I passed the then Com­mon En­trance for Queen’s Roy­al Col­lege, it is where my fam­i­ly is from, it is where I vis­it my moth­er al­most every week. It is where I still call home. So Frankie was my Mem­ber of Par­lia­ment and I knew him both as a con­stituent and a jour­nal­ist.

In the Ma­yaro con­stituen­cy, Frankie was al­ways there for his con­stituents. He was not an ab­sen­tee MP as of­ten oc­curred in Ma­yaro and which the con­stituen­cy had re­ject­ed in 1995, in favour of the for­mer chair­man of the Ma­yaro Re­gion­al Cor­po­ra­tion, Raza­ck Ali.

Even af­ter Khan ceased to be the MP for the area, he al­ways played a role in every sub­se­quent elec­tion in that con­stituen­cy, of­ten as cam­paign man­ag­er or con­stituen­cy co­or­di­na­tor.

Khan spoke the lan­guage of the or­di­nary man and nev­er lost sight of where he came from, of­ten proud­ly talk­ing about life in Ma­yaro and the need to de­vel­op rur­al ar­eas.

Busi­ness Guardian read­ers will know that I had been very crit­i­cal of Khan re­cent­ly, cul­mi­nat­ing in a De­cem­ber 24, 2020 ar­ti­cle ti­tled, Please go now Min­is­ter Khan, in which I urged the late Min­is­ter to ex­it the Min­istry of En­er­gy.

In that ar­ti­cle, I ar­gued that T&T’s en­er­gy sec­tor was in trou­ble and it was clear that the Gov­ern­ment and Khan seemed in­ca­pable of find­ing so­lu­tions.

I ar­gued that Khan had been in charge of the sec­tor for the last four and a half years and even though it is un­fair to blame a sin­gle in­di­vid­ual for the trou­bles of the sec­tor, one could not de­ny things were go­ing wrong.

I, how­ev­er, point­ed out a cou­ple things about Khan in the ar­ti­cle. I wrote, “I have known Mr Khan for a long time and he is al­ways a pleas­ant man. But when it’s time to go we must ex­it the stage. We must all know when we can do no more.”

I went fur­ther to write on De­cem­ber 24, “It is no se­cret that Khan un­der­went ma­jor heart surgery a cou­ple years ago and we are all hap­py he was able to re­cov­er, but as we looked at him shuf­fle to re­ceive his let­ter of ap­point­ment from the Pres­i­dent, one could not help feel a sense of sad­ness that the Prime Min­is­ter would put such bur­den on a man who has giv­en so much and who is clear­ly in the win­ter of his years and would bet­ter spend his time with fam­i­ly and tak­ing care of his health.”

The Op­po­si­tion UNC then used sig­nif­i­cant por­tions of my De­cem­ber 24 ar­ti­cle as the ba­sis for their no-con­fi­dence mo­tion in Khan, call­ing on him to re­sign or be fired as En­er­gy Min­is­ter.

Yet, when I asked Khan for a full-length in­ter­view, he with­out hes­i­ta­tion agreed, and on March 5, a month and a half be­fore he died at home, Khan sat down for an hour and three quar­ters with a jour­nal­ist who was se­vere­ly crit­i­cal of him and an­swered chal­leng­ing ques­tions. An in­ter­view in which he knew noth­ing was off the ta­ble and where he showed his class and demon­strat­ed con­fi­dence that even if you dis­agreed with his ap­proach, he was pre­pared to ar­gue his case.

You see for Frankie, it was okay to dis­agree with him, whether pri­vate­ly or pub­licly. And yes he was the kind of per­son where if he saw you at Pan­chos, How’zat or any oth­er wa­ter­ing hole, he was pre­pared to have a drink with you and de­bate with you.

Khan was not a politi­cian who held grudges for his de­trac­tors or jour­nal­ists and did not adopt the po­si­tion that he knew every­thing and there­fore no one else should have a view at vari­ance with his.

In what turned out to be his last full-length in­ter­view, the for­mer Min­is­ter of En­er­gy was can­did about the chal­lenges he was fac­ing as Min­is­ter of En­er­gy.

He said, “I will be dis­hon­est if I do not say that the gas in­dus­try, in terms of the gas val­ue chain in T&T has chal­lenges. Un­like shale gas in Amer­i­ca, we can­not get gas at $1 or $2. It is hinged to the same is­sue I spoke about with small fields, high­er unit cost of de­vel­op­ment. There is the is­sue of the NGC as the ag­gre­ga­tor and there is the is­sue of the Point Lisas plants and com­mod­i­ty prices.”

Khan sought to de­fend the in­crease in nat­ur­al gas prices, say­ing the up­stream­ers (bpTT, Roy­al Dutch Shell, EOG Re­sources and BHP) made a cred­i­ble case that they have to have high­er gas prices be­cause they will col­lapse.

“A chain is as strong as its weak­est link, with­out up­stream there can be no down­stream, with­out any down­stream there al­so can­not be any up­stream, so they have to live in a sym­bi­ot­ic re­la­tion­ship,” the En­er­gy Min­is­ter said.

As al­ways hap­pens with in­ter­views, of­ten oth­er dis­cus­sions oc­cur off the record and Khan told me that he agreed the coun­try had to move quick­ly to get as much oil out of the ground as pos­si­ble be­cause it was clear that crude oil would not be a com­mod­i­ty that could add val­ue for the coun­try in the long term.

He was more op­ti­mistic about nat­ur­al gas and the win­dow left for gas. He said to me, as a na­tion­al­ist, he hoped the ex­perts were wrong and the win­dow for hy­dro­car­bons would last well be­yond 2050.

Khan, in the in­ter­view, al­so boast­ed of the cadre of young pro­fes­sion­als he had brought in­to the Min­istry of En­er­gy. He said many of them had at­tend­ed some of the best uni­ver­si­ties in the world and were as bright as any of their peers.

Frankie was a na­tion­al­ist and the coun­try is poor­er for his loss.

May he rest in peace and may his fam­i­ly find com­fort in the time they spent with him.