KEVON FELMINE
kevon.felmine@guardian.co.tt

Al­though the Afro-Trinida­di­ans have moved away from whip­pings, rapes and lynch­ings at the hands of their slave mas­ters, 182 years lat­er, Eman­ci­pa­tion has not seen them hold the reigns of eco­nom­ic pow­er.Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment vice-chair­man Robert Le Hunte said this is not be­cause they are lazy and lack busi­ness acu­men, but be­cause they are sub­ject­ed to sys­tem­at­ic so­ci­etal is­sues.“We have to move away from say­ing black peo­ple are lazy or black peo­ple can­not do busi­ness. We have to de­bunk our­selves from this sim­plis­tic con­ver­sa­tion,” Le Hunte said.

He added: “How can you have as a coun­try that 34 per cent of the pop­u­la­tion is black and on­ly 10 sig­nif­i­cant black-owned busi­ness­es. That can­not be right.”

Speak­ing against the back­drop of yes­ter­day’s Eman­ci­pa­tion Day cel­e­bra­tions, Le Hunte said be­lieves the Au­gust 1 hol­i­day must be more than a pro­ces­sion, a dis­cus­sion and Bob Mar­ley’s Re­demp­tion Song. It should be about recog­nis­ing so­ci­etal is­sues and im­ple­ment­ing prac­ti­cal so­lu­tions to build a na­tion.
The con­se­quences of in­ac­tion would be un­der­per­for­mance of Afro-Trinida­di­ans, widen­ing of the in­come dis­tri­b­u­tion gap and more so­cial un­rest among dis­en­chant­ed groups, lead­ing to an im­plo­sion of T&T.
He re­called hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with a friend of Syr­i­an lin­eage, who re­mem­bered com­ing to T&T poor and how his fam­i­ly of eight sat for din­ner at nights, and the con­ver­sa­tion al­ways in­clud­ed ways to make mon­ey.
“If oth­ers got mon­ey, what is go­ing to be the fo­cus? They will take the mon­ey and send the child to school. The big­ger point I am mak­ing is that there is no blame game. There are fac­tu­al so­cial rea­sons be­cause peo­ple were ori­ent­ed in sev­er­al dif­fer­ent ways. There are rea­sons why to­day one group of peo­ple is in­to busi­ness and one is not.”

He com­mend­ed Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley for Eman­ci­pa­tion Day ad­dress, say­ing he be­lieves young Afro-Trinida­di­ans youths should have he­roes to em­u­late. He re­called look­ing up to sev­er­al busi­ness­men as a child, in­clud­ing Cyril Duprey, founder of Colo­nial Life In­sur­ance Com­pa­ny (CLI­CO).

“I want­ed to be like them,” he said and al­so point­ing out that he had re­cent­ly been the man­ag­ing di­rec­tor of Re­pub­lic Bank, Ghana.

While he ad­mit­ted that race is a sen­si­tive top­ic, Le Hunte said for T&T to progress, peo­ple need to feel com­fort­able speak­ing about the is­sue, es­pe­cial­ly as one of the na­tion­al watch­words is tol­er­ance.

He said peo­ple of African de­scent should look at how oth­er races achieved suc­cess and choose the fac­tors they can in­cor­po­rate in­to their na­tion-build­ing ef­forts.
As he called up­on the coun­try to re­flect on the abo­li­tion of slav­ery, Le Hunte said he wants Op­po­si­tion Leader Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar to apol­o­gise for com­par­ing the gov­ern­ment’s COVID-19 repa­tri­a­tion of cit­i­zens to slav­ery. 
“Our lead­ers need to be lead­ers and stop mak­ing these wild state­ments. To me, when you make a state­ment like that, you dis­re­spect peo­ple you want to lead and do not un­der­stand the trau­ma they went through. My po­si­tion on that is we are all aware of the trau­mas of slav­ery. I con­sid­ered it to be very in­sen­si­tive at best and ig­no­rant at worst to make that com­par­i­son.”