Pres­i­dent-elect Chris­tine Kan­ga­loo will be in­au­gu­rat­ed as this coun­try’s sev­enth Pres­i­dent from 10.20 am at the Queen’s Park Sa­van­nah, Port-of-Spain, to­day, bring­ing down the cur­tains on out­go­ing Pres­i­dent Paula-Mae Weekes’ term.

The tran­si­tion should not be a tough one for Kan­ga­loo, who served as act­ing Pres­i­dent on sev­er­al oc­ca­sions dur­ing Weekes’ time in of­fice. She was re-elect­ed Pres­i­dent of the Sen­ate in Au­gust 2021, fol­low­ing the 2020 Gen­er­al Elec­tion and was first elect­ed to this po­si­tion in Sep­tem­ber 2015, fol­low­ing the 2015 Gen­er­al Elec­tion.

Her as­cen­sion to the apo­lit­i­cal of­fice fol­lows over two decades in pub­lic ser­vice af­ter be­ing ap­point­ed an Op­po­si­tion Sen­a­tor in 2001.

When nom­i­nat­ed by the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment for the po­si­tion of Pres­i­dent in Jan­u­ary, how­ev­er, the UNC ob­ject­ed to what it termed a ‘po­lit­i­cal ap­pointee’ and nom­i­nat­ed Is­rael Khan SC as its nom­i­nee.

Kan­ga­loo sub­se­quent­ly con­vinc­ing­ly won the elec­tion to be­come Pres­i­dent, se­cur­ing 66 per cent of the vote. She re­ceived 48 votes against 22 votes for the UNC nom­i­nee, with three spoiled bal­lots.

Out­go­ing Pres­i­dent Weekes told Guardian Me­dia in an in­ter­view last week that she was de­light­ed an­oth­er fe­male will suc­ceed her.

Weekes said, “I think the two fe­male Pres­i­dents back-to-back cer­tain­ly will place a stamp on Trinidad and To­ba­go and in all fields of en­deav­our, young women will no longer be con­sid­er­ing whether male or fe­male has any­thing to do with their as­pi­ra­tions and their even­tu­al ca­reers, pro­fes­sions and lives.”

Asked what her fi­nal mes­sage to the peo­ple of T&T was, Weekes said, “It was an ho­n­our and priv­i­lege to serve you, and serve you I did to the best of my abil­i­ty. I have not lost to the Pollyan­na I came to of­fice with and de­spite all of our chal­lenges and all of our ills, I re­main con­vinced that to­geth­er we can make Trinidad and To­ba­go the place we want it to be. We may go through some more tri­als be­fore we get there but get there we will.”

When she was nom­i­nat­ed, Kan­ga­loo said she was hum­bled and ready to serve T&T.

“Now that the elec­tion is over, I look for­ward to serv­ing our coun­try in the on­ly way I know how—with love for all and with an un­wa­ver­ing be­lief in the in­nate good­ness of our peo­ple,” Kan­ga­loo said then.