Six­ty years ago to the day, Trinidad and To­ba­go be­came an in­de­pen­dent na­tion. Lead­ing that move­ment was Dr Er­ic Eu­stace Williams, who earned him­self the ti­tle of Fa­ther of the Na­tion for in­still­ing in cit­i­zens then, the yearn­ing to chart their own course.

As cit­i­zens re­flect on the mo­ment the Union Jack of Great Britain came down and the red, white and black na­tion­al flag, rep­re­sent­ing the birth of a new in­de­pen­dent na­tion, went up for the first time, no one can take away the eu­pho­ria of that mo­ment.

As the coun­try turns 60 to­day, a di­a­mond ju­bilee mile­stone rep­re­sent­ing a sig­nif­i­cant pe­ri­od of ac­com­plish­ment, there is again much to be cel­e­brat­ed.

As an in­de­pen­dent na­tion com­man­deer­ing its own af­fairs, T&T, a lit­tle dot of a twin is­land in the Caribbean Sea with a mere 1.3 mil­lion peo­ple, has been able to stand up and tell the world we have ar­rived.

Lead­ing that charge has been our aca­d­e­m­ic, ath­let­ic and cul­tur­al he­roes, who con­tin­ue to make the biggest splash on the world stage, of­ten unit­ing the en­tire coun­try in pe­ri­ods of cel­e­bra­tion with their achieve­ments. The likes of Hasley Craw­ford, Pe­ter Min­shall, Derek Wal­cott, VS Naipaul, the Mighty Spar­row, Lord Kitch­en­er, Claude Noel, Janelle Pen­ny Com­mis­siong, Giselle Laronde-West, Wendy Fitzwilliam, Bri­an Lara, Dwight Yorke, Ato Boldon and of more re­cent vin­tage, Jereem Richards, Keshorn Wal­cott and Nicholas Paul, and too many more to name in this space, have all brought glo­ry to T&T dur­ing the pe­ri­od.

The coun­try con­tin­ues to ben­e­fit from our ex­per­tise in the en­er­gy sec­tor, on the back of which we have been able to sus­tain our own de­vel­op­ment over the years. Not to be out­done, how­ev­er, our pri­vate sec­tor has al­so been in­no­v­a­tive, with the man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor in par­tic­u­lar op­er­at­ing at world-class lev­els.

Free health­care and ter­tiary ed­u­ca­tion, up to the un­der­grad­u­ate lev­el un­til re­cent­ly, re­main ma­jor ben­e­fits to our hu­man cap­i­tal, so much so that they are some­times over­looked and for­got­ten.

The re­cent abil­i­ty of the coun­try's health­care work­ers to steer us through the bulk of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, which will go down as one of the worst health emer­gen­cies in his­to­ry, is al­so noth­ing to look past.

Yet, there were al­so dark spots dur­ing the pe­ri­od as well.

The 1990 at­tempt­ed coup and the as­sas­si­na­tion of Dana See­ta­hal, one of our bright­est le­gal minds, re­main stains on the democ­ra­cy this coun­try has man­aged to main­tain and per­haps al­so ex­posed a side of us wait­ing for the un­sus­pect­ing mo­ments to strike at the heart of our ex­is­tence.

In­deed, crime and cor­rup­tion re­main two of the biggest con­cerns and bur­dens on the trea­sury and cit­i­zens. In fact, as we mark this oc­ca­sion to­day, some sec­tors of so­ci­ety will choose not to go out be­cause of a lack of trust in the state to guar­an­tee their safe­ty while do­ing so.

Of course, many will ar­gue the dif­fer­ence be­tween politi­cians of Dr Williams’ ilk and those cur­rent­ly func­tion­ing is al­so of con­cern, since T&T can­not achieve its true po­ten­tial go­ing for­ward if the cur­rent batch do not move past their my­opic way of think­ing and put the coun­try first.

Still, all in all, T&T has much to be thank­ful for to­day. And to that, we say, hap­py In­de­pen­dence Day T&T!