Guest Columns

“Act 51 of the Summary Offences Act prohibits ‘indecency’ in public places specifically mentioning anyone who (a) is indecently attired; (b) performs any lewd or suggestive dancing or actions; (c) in any play, song, ballad or speech, uses language, or makes use of any recording, which is profane, indecent or …

Plural societies, such as ours, are prone to tensions and to pretend that it is a new thing is folly. What is new is the disrespectful disagreement we now witness as we moved from social polarisation (living in different communities) to issue polarisation (where we cannot agree on the essentials …

Hurray … election goodies have begun. The income tax amnesty has been extended to September 30th. But like an ungrateful voter, my response is a big steups. Unless the extension of time is accompanied by the release of refund cheques, we are all in the same place. The tax amnesty …

The unravelling of the contract between the Housing Development Corporation (HDC) and Chinese construction company, Gezhou­ba Group In­ter­na­tion­al En­gi­neer­ing Co Ltd (CG­GC), is so close to the fourth anniversary of PNM’s 2015 election victory because it represents the collapse of a significant plank upon which the Keith Rowley-led administration placed …

Prior to the 1990s, the Jamaican business community lived a split life: families in Florida with a commuting businessman. That model did not work—investment plunged, making the businesses uncompetitive. By 1992, their dollar was reeling, causing much concern about social and economic stability. Gordon ‘Butch’ Stewart then stepped up with …

John Lennon, the Beatle, in 1965, wrote these haunting lyrics: “You better run for your life if you can, little girl / Hide your head in the sand, little girl / Catch you with another man / That’s the end, little girl / Well, you know that I’m a wicked …

Sedition, careful, careful how you talking … hey hey! Sedition, careful, careful whey you walking Incompetent idiots have genuine patriots Always under escort in the sedition court. The Mighty Sparrow (Sedition) The Sedition Act, used recently to charge Watson Duke (and earlier Michael Seales and Abu Bakr), is a dangerous …

David Muhammad: “It is globally embarrassing, socially backward, and developmentally counter-productive, for any society that promotes ideals of free speech in the 21st Century to conjure up ghosts of the intellectually dark ages of as far back as the 17th Century [such as the Sedition Act]…” Police Commissioner Gary Griffith: …

The past few weeks have left me stunned by the antics of our leadership. Penny, Marlene, Burkee, Simonette, Espinet, Quamina … I can go on and on, but there is one common theme: they were headlined in the media because of some act of incompetence by the leadership of our …

Shoshana Zuboff (2019) points to ‘the oldest political questions: Home or exile? Lord or subject? Master or slave? … eternal themes of knowledge, authority and power’. This week, with the firing of Wil Espinet, we are confronted with the same issues. Saddened by the crime situation and having had to …

When Christopher Columbus arrived on our shores, the Caribs and Arawaks did not know what was about to befall them. Nothing in their past prepared them to understand and deal with the invasion and they were decimated by guns and germs. Reading two recent local contributions about the phenomenon of …

How do you transform from slinging crack cocaine to slinging billionaire lyrics to slinging ‘house nigger’ semantics within two decades—while simultaneously kicking to the curb the most prominent black face in the fight for social justice for the last generation in one fell swoop? Easy, you’re US hip hop star …