One of the mis­takes we make in as­sess­ing the val­ue of the Cari­com project is to re­gard so­cio-cul­tur­al sol­i­dar­i­ty as its sole as­set.

The most dis­turb­ing con­se­quence of the re­cent po­lit­i­cal con­tro­ver­sy sur­round­ing African Eman­ci­pa­tion Day has not been the ex­changes be­tween the Gov­ern­ment and the Op­po­si­tion.

Whilst for­mer prime min­is­ter Bas­deo Pan­day fa­mous­ly said that pol­i­tics has a moral­i­ty of its own, build­ing and main­tain­ing a con­sti­tu­tion­al democ­ra­cy is found­ed on a few ba­sic prin­ci­ples and a com­mit­ment to main­tain­ing those prin­ci­ples by more than mere lip ser­vice.

On Eman­ci­pa­tion Day, yes­ter­day, Min­is­ter of Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty Roger Alexan­der shared his thoughts on the loom­ing ex­tinc­tion of “Africans”—who have sup­pos­ed­ly suc­cumbed to a “men­tal slav­ery” he didn’t prop­er­ly de­scribe.

African Eman­ci­pa­tion Day, which is be­ing cel­e­brat­ed to­day, is a na­tion­al ob­ser­vance that car­ries a sig­nif­i­cance far be­yond the his­tor­i­cal abo­li­tion of slav­ery. This is a day to re­mem­ber suf­fer­ing, ho­n­our re­sis­tance, and cel­e­brate re­silience, and a mo­ment to ex­am­ine how the Eman­ci­pa­tion ex­pe­ri­ence con­tin­ues to shape Trinidad and To­ba­go so­ci­ety and to chal­lenge us to build a na­tion that tru­ly re­flects the promise that “every creed and race finds an equal place.”

There is lit­tle doubt that the Chron­ic Dis­ease As­sis­tance Pro­gramme (CDAP) is one of the most im­por­tant and con­se­quen­tial so­cial pro­grammes im­ple­ment­ed in post-In­de­pen­dence Trinidad and To­ba­go.

A re­view of the dai­ly re­port­ing land­scape in Trinidad and To­ba­go presents a clear pic­ture of a so­ci­ety wrestling with deep and com­plex chal­lenges.

To­day, as Bar­ba­dos lays Sir Garfield Sobers to rest, the Caribbean bids farewell not on­ly to one of its great­est crick­eters, but to one of the finest sym­bols of re­gion­al uni­ty our is­lands have ever known.

The con­cerns sur­round­ing the leaked au­dio record­ing that re­port­ed­ly formed part of the ba­sis for Pre­ven­tive De­ten­tion Or­ders (PDOs) be­ing is­sued against busi­ness­man Do­minic Hadeed, his wife Genevieve and rel­a­tive Star Sab­ga go to the very heart of the rule of law, the in­tegri­ty of the jus­tice sys­tem and the pub­lic’s con­fi­dence in State in­sti­tu­tions.

Amid the con­tro­ver­sy sur­round­ing a leaked tele­phone con­ver­sa­tion in­volv­ing busi­ness­woman Star Sab­ga and mem­bers of the Hadeed fam­i­ly, for­mer House Speak­er Nizam Mo­hammed has drawn at­ten­tion to a broad­er and ar­guably more im­por­tant is­sue: the hun­dreds of cit­i­zens de­tained un­der Pre­ven­tive De­ten­tion Or­ders (PDOs) who lack the fi­nan­cial means to se­cure le­gal rep­re­sen­ta­tion.

The rule of law is a cor­ner­stone of any de­mo­c­ra­t­ic so­ci­ety. It rests on the prin­ci­ple that no one is above the law and that all cit­i­zens are en­ti­tled to equal treat­ment re­gard­less of race, sta­tus, gen­der or po­lit­i­cal af­fil­i­a­tion.

On Mon­day, Trinidad and To­ba­go will mark the 36th an­niver­sary of the at­tempt­ed coup of Ju­ly 27, 1990, at a time when na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty once again dom­i­nates pub­lic dis­cus­sion. The on­go­ing State of Emer­gency, the use of Pre­ven­tive De­ten­tion Or­ders (PDOs) and de­bate over the bal­ance be­tween pub­lic safe­ty and civ­il lib­er­ties make this an­niver­sary par­tic­u­lar­ly rel­e­vant.