“How sleep you now, unfeeling kings? Does one human feeling creep through your hearts’ remorseless sleep?” These were the words of the poet Percy Shelley challenging suppression of the working class. There are no words strong enough to condemn the cruelty of the management of Paria Fuel Trading Company …
Read More »Daly Bread: The Carnival beyond 2022 discussion and calypso’s changing context
Views reportedly expressed by the well-qualified presenters at a webinar, entitled ‘Hosting and managing the Carnival Experience in Trinidad and Tobago in 2022 and Beyond’, converged with much of what I have been writing concerning Carnival and cultural development matters over several years, including last Sunday. The Trinidad Express newspaper …
Read More »Daly Bread: Continuing inaction in culture and Carnival, and its cost to T&T’s creative sector
‘Covid-19 will force us to re-build our economy,’ I wrote nearly two years ago, in April 2020. ‘We should place our vibrant performing arts at the core of the recovery agenda, not merely with the disproportionate focus on one transitory carnival season, which we may not even have in 2021. …
Read More »Daly Bread: Subversion by subvention; how state companies like the NCC make mas
Our country has been widely shamed internationally by the Trinidad and Tobago Coast Guard’s fatal shooting of an illegal migrant baby. The use of the label ‘accident’, the premature ducking of responsibility and due process as well as the crude, partisan political exchanges have compounded the shame. For the moment, …
Read More »Daly Bread: Stop mamaguying us about a ‘safe zone’ Carnival, and tell us what the ‘taste’ costs
The government has decided to permit gatherings to participate in the limited forms of Carnival celebrations that it has belatedly decided to promote this season. Perhaps it should drop the ‘safe zones’ pretence. Such zones may not be workable with the freeing-up and ‘leggo’ of Trinidad and Tobago Carnival. There …
Read More »Daly Bread: Governance by manoeuvres and leaks; what next for Griffith and the Stanley John report?
The current Government, having voted in Parliament for the appointment of Gary Griffith as commissioner of police (CoP) on the occasion of his first appointment, clearly no longer wished to have him returned to that office. This should not have been a problem. Griffith had been appointed on a fixed-term …
Read More »Daly Bread: The AG’s dodgy sea legs make his Govt stumble over Ocean Pelican
The People’s National Movement (PNM) campaigned obsessively in the Tobago House of Assembly (THA) elections on the issue of the suitability of Watson Duke for office, and lost comprehensively. Days later, it began trying to discredit the winning party by reference to Duke’s alleged conflicts of interest. The court …
Read More »Daly Bread: Unending questions, unfinished business
We begin 2022 in the midst of times of intense uncertainty, at least equal to that of wartime but probably bigger because every country in the world is simultaneously a theatre of upheaval. Moreover, the uncertainty is not just a generalised one about the future; it is an uncertainty about …
Read More »Daly Bread: A triumph of legitimacy; PDP’s Farley gave good ‘calpet’ to PNM bullies
Farley Augustine and the Progressive Democratic Patriots (PDP) have interrupted the alarming descent of Trinidad and Tobago into an authoritarian one-party state and I thank them for that. Having comprehensively routed the incumbent People’s National Movement (PNM) in the Tobago House of Assembly elections, in the backyard of its leader …
Read More »Daly Bread: Excuses feeding failure; reconstituted PolSC must still account for CoP merit list
George Washington Carver was born into conditions of slavery but nevertheless became a prominent agricultural scientist and innovator in crop farming. I mention him in the context of our leaders masking reality with excuses. Carver stated his view in a single sentence: ‘Ninety-nine per cent of failures come from …
Read More »Daly Bread: Where are we now? Decapitated TTPS is cost of President’s actions on 11 August
Two weeks ago, the President of the Republic in her words ‘spoke to the issue of the substantive appointment of commissioner of police’ and confirmed that ‘an order of merit list was delivered on 11 August 2021 to the OTP and withdrawn almost immediately’. OTP is a reference to the …
Read More »Daly Bread: All farcical and tangled up—between an evasive Govt and an unattractive Opposition
Many readers will recall the political controversies in which President Anthony Carmona, the immediate predecessor of our current president, was involved—arising out of the purported exercise of powers that he thought he had. As a result, citizens hoped that the presidency would return to calmer waters, not made turbulent by …
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