Tony Rakhal-Fras­er

The aris­ing of con­flict­ual events and the hasty, an­gry re­ac­tions of the Gov­ern­ment to those sit­u­a­tions have so­lid­i­fied in my mind that Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar and her Gov­ern­ment are un­con­vinced of what they have been able to achieve up to this point.

Last week, the col­umn looked at the con­tin­u­ing angst and ma­jor dis­com­fort across the coun­try re­gard­ing crime, the break­out of the race an­tag­o­nism, which is nev­er very far from the sur­face be­tween the ma­jor par­ties and eth­nic poli­ties, i.e., the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress and the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment, has so­lid­i­fied my claim that there is a mea­sure of pan­ic com­ing from the Gov­ern­ment.

Hav­ing to re­spond to the charges of the Gov­ern­ment, in­clud­ing the most re­cent claim re­lat­ing to the elec­tric­i­ty billing, the PNM Par­lia­men­tar­i­ans and their leader have re­turned a mea­sure of life and re­silience to the par­ty that was scat­tered, al­most dis­graced in the poll of 2025.

The ob­vi­ous­ly planned con­dem­na­tion of the “One Per­cent” – i.e., the Syr­i­an-Lebanese busi­ness and so­cial com­mu­ni­ty through se­ri­ous al­le­ga­tions against the group by At­tor­ney Gen­er­al John Je­re­mie, opened the race-based con­tentions of the sea­son at that lev­el. And it mat­ters not the at­tempt by the pub­lic re­la­tions gu­rus of the UNC to seek to shift the at­tack on the spe­cif­ic com­mu­ni­ty to a large and amor­phous busi­ness group.

The fact is that back in 2017, a mem­ber of the Syr­i­an-Lebanese com­mu­ni­ty self-de­scribed the group as the “one per­cent” which con­trolled large por­tions of the busi­ness and wealth of the coun­try to Amer­i­can in­ter­view­er, An­tho­ny Bour­dain, on his CNN show, Parts Un­known. Usu­al­ly, his­to­ry re­mains stur­dy and un­flinch­ing against at­tempts to rewrite its re­al­i­ty.

But even be­fore the Par­lia­men­tary at­tack against the one per cent, Min­is­ter Bar­ry Padarath, who has been in­volved in the pro­pa­gan­da ef­fort from the start, charged the Op­po­si­tion and oth­er pro­test­ers against the Gov­ern­ment as “race-bait­ing and di­vi­sion.”

On cue, the PNM rep­re­sen­ta­tive for Laven­tille West, Ka­reem Mar­celle, en­gaged the most in­tense and pro­longed at­tack on the UNC steeped in racial an­tag­o­nism: “They hate African peo­ple, they hate black peo­ple, they hate peo­ple from Beetham, they hate peo­ple from Sea Lots, they hate peo­ple from Mal­oney, they hate peo­ple from La Hor­quet­ta, they hate peo­ple from Train Line….”

As can be ex­pect­ed, the PR gu­rus of both sides have since been do­ing every­thing to strip the con­tentions of the very ex­plic­it ef­forts to en­gage the race fac­tor that has been cen­tral to the po­lit­i­cal mo­bil­i­sa­tion and op­er­a­tions of the two ma­jor par­ties for decades; to be ex­act, the pol­i­tics of race has been sewn in­to the pol­i­tics of the PNM and UNC.

My con­tention is that the in­ten­sive race-bait­ing start­ing this ear­ly in the race to­wards the elec­tion four years away, com­ing from the Gov­ern­ment is a kind of fall­back po­si­tion to shield it from the re­al­i­ty of the sit­u­a­tion, i.e., the fail­ing strug­gle to meet the chal­lenges of the econ­o­my and so­ci­ety.

The PNM, per­haps not­ing the anx­i­ety of the UNC, and it­self lack­ing some form of po­lit­i­cal-elec­toral stim­u­lous of its own, has ex­cit­ed­ly en­tered in­to the race con­test, which is a sta­ple in po­lit­i­cal and elec­toral cam­paign­ing by the two ma­jor par­ties.

Un­for­tu­nate­ly, the vic­tims, losers in all of the trib­al war­fare, are the peo­ple of the coun­try, the econ­o­my, the so­cial com­mu­ni­ty, with all its oth­er prob­lems in need of the fo­cused at­ten­tion of the Gov­ern­ment and the Op­po­si­tion. For the Gov­ern­ment with the heavy bur­den of re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for mov­ing the coun­try from the ever present sense of im­pend­ing doom, the con­se­quences are great­est.

In the in­stance of the PNM seek­ing to por­tray it­self as the gov­ern­ment in wait­ing, it is dis­play­ing lit­tle which can re-en­gage the 150,000 elec­tion votes it lost over the ten-year pe­ri­od of be­ing in gov­ern­ment.

What should be a bonus for the Gov­ern­ment is that in the most re­cent times, the Drag­on Gas arrange­ment with Venezuela has come to the fore, with Shell gain­ing an in­side track to bring the gas here for pro­cess­ing. There are al­so oth­er oil and gas op­tions which are pos­si­ble. But be­cause of the in­nate de­pen­dence on the mo­bil­i­sa­tion and op­er­a­tion on the ba­sis of racial pol­i­tics, far too lit­tle fo­cus has been placed on drag­ging the econ­o­my out of its mori­bund state and mak­ing the case to the coun­try.

In keep­ing with the na­ture of the pol­i­tics, the PNM is al­so be­ing con­sumed by the race fac­tor and op­po­si­tion­ist pol­i­tics. That has left the par­ty’s lead­er­ship seem­ing­ly in­ca­pable of noth­ing more than re­spond­ing to Gov­ern­ment poli­cies with­out propos­ing a path for­ward.

The ob­vi­ous cit­i­zen con­cerns are those gen­er­at­ed by the above neg­a­tive con­tes­ta­tions and the in­abil­i­ty of suc­ceed­ing gov­ern­ments and op­po­si­tion par­ties to set the stage for the kind of eco­nom­ic trans­for­ma­tion that all of the ex­perts have been in­sist­ing on for decades, is what is need­ed to end the for­ev­er de­pen­dence on the one-crop econ­o­my of our his­tor­i­cal past.

The ob­vi­ous ques­tion which faces the cit­i­zens is whether so­ci­ety can con­tin­ue to de­pend on the two ma­jor par­ties in their present form to achieve trans­for­ma­tion.

Tony Rakhal-Fras­er – free­lance jour­nal­ist, for­mer re­porter/cur­rent af­fairs pro­gramme host and News Di­rec­tor at TTT, pro­gramme pro­duc­er/cur­rent af­fairs di­rec­tor at Ra­dio Trinidad, cor­re­spon­dent for the BBC Caribbean Ser­vice and the As­so­ci­at­ed Press, grad­u­ate of UWI, CARI­MAC, Mona and St Au­gus­tine – In­sti­tute of In­ter­na­tion­al Re­la­tions.