Daly Bread: Ambiguity, sovereignty and policy palsy—pondering US’ naval play and NGC’s withdrawal

Last week, in light of the current United States naval presence in Caribbean waters, I posed a question about sovereignty, to which I return below.

However, I must begin this week noting that the National Gas Company (NGC), a premier state enterprise, has pelted both the Minister of Education, Dr Michael Dowlath MP, and the Minister of Culture and Community Development, Ms Michelle Benjamin MP, into the proverbial bamboo.

While speechifying at the photo-op closing of the pan camp of the President of the Republic on 18 July 2025, the Minister of Education claimed “to draw inspiration” from the work of the late economist and historian, Lloyd Best, promoting “panyards as a foundation for economic development and community engagement”.

This Minister reminded us of Best’s view of the potential of the panyard “to foster civic harmony and community collaboration while also engaging what he called sleeping resources and native intuition”.

Nevertheless, mere weeks later, NGC has withdrawn sponsorship from Couva Joylanders, La Brea Nightingales and Steel Explosion of Tobago, all hard-working steel orchestras—and, in the case of Joylanders, a medium band Panorama champion.

None of these bands are located in the now stigmatised “North”, but they get a yellow jook anyway.

Subsequently, another high-sounding bundle of words in the form of a press release from Minister Benjamin’s office highlighted the ambiguity and policy palsy of the Government regarding the national musical instrument.

The press release represented that “active conversations” between Beverley Ramsey-Moore, president of Pan Trinbago, and representatives of NGC, to explore a feasible way forward, have been “prioritized” by Minister Benjamin.

What is the update on that alleged priority and why isn’t Minister Benjamin chairing those conversations?

Returning now to the United States naval presence in Caribbean waters, the usual arguments about protecting our sovereignty require, in my opinion, an essential modification.

This would acknowledge that Trinidad and Tobago has surrendered control of our territory to powerful criminal elements—internally as well as externally—through carelessly porous borders.

In those circumstances over what do we realistically have sovereignty?

I was heartened by the recent statement of Ancel Roget, president general of the Oilfields Workers Trade Union (OWTU).

He balanced well the OWTU’s long standing insistence on the Caribbean remaining a zone of peace and free of military conflict with insistence that “the Caribbean must also be free from the warring consequences of the unlimited flow of drugs, arms and ammunition”, which he stated “has been a direct threat to our citizens living with a sense of safety and security”.

Mr Roget continued: “The Caribbean must never become a zone for gangs, cartels, organised crime and the free movement of sophisticated arms and ammunitions, which has resulted in thousands of murders in our country.” (See the Trinidad Guardian 9 September 2025.)

I have persistently warned against the consequences of going in the wrong direction in which our rulers allowed our small nation to be pulled, aided by the indifference of so-called civil society and those amassing questionable profits nonchalantly.

I summarized that situation in my violent crime retrospective published on Republic Day 2023, in which I quoted one of the things that I wrote 20 years earlier:

“If any government does not act independently of the criminal element in the society, whether they are grassroots bandits or the ‘devils in disguise’ the regulation of society in the interest of the common good will eventually become impossible.

“The laws of the land will have legal validity but will cease to be effective.”

Three weeks before that column was published in 2003, an editorial in this newspaper said of the drug trade:

“This trade has been going on for so long –about 50 years -that it is now so deeply embedded in the very fabric of the society that the question of securing the country from its nefarious impacts is not even on the agenda.

I ask those now touting the purported success of the current Government in fighting crime:

Has the situation of embedded crime changed?  Perhaps an even more urgent question is this: will we not be in that same situation when the State of Emergency comes to an end and no charges have been laid?

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Martin Daly

Martin G Daly SC is a prominent attorney-at-law. He is a former Independent Senator and past president of the Law Association of Trinidad and Tobago.
He is chairman of the Pat Bishop Foundation and a steelpan music enthusiast.