Steelpan survival

Some of us have had the time, patience, and interest to repeatedly consider the late Merchant’s 1985 suggestion that the steelpan might have at that time been “in danger.”

Now, we have lived long enough to have put such an assertion to relatively comfortable rest. For, the young people who played then and who, some proposed, were not turning up in the audience, are now the “elders” sitting in the stands while new generations of young people play.

If you did not attend in person, you hopefully had a chance to sample online what was on offer at the Queen’s Park Savannah on August 11 – World Steelpan Day.

You would have had the opportunity to challenge that belief of 41 years ago that had been fueled by self-effacing fears generated since the turbulent birth of the instrument

There has been enough time, since then, to suggest that the turnstile of participation has rotated more than once. No. Pan is not in danger, at least not in the way of endangered natural species.

If there is danger of any kind, it would have to come from wilful vandalism. For, the current trajectory is progressive in nature and, in my view, irreversible.

By “wilful vandalism” I do not mean somebody taking a jackhammer to a pan. I am hinting at the likely impact of collective neglect, squander, politicisation, under-investment, mismanagement, and other actions to dismantle the gains that generations of people have painstakingly achieved.

Last week, I made the case that the steelpan is one of the world’s most extraordinary “renewable” resources. Oil and gas are extracted and consumed. Their reserves diminish. Upstream and downstream activities rely on expendable resources. They recede and disappear when supplies run short.

Pan is different. Every time a generation learns to tune, arrange, compose, perform, teach, manufacture, design, organise or innovate, it adds to the lineage. Every time we invest in pan, we increase the reserves.

If you have time, try calculating where else the same musical instrument is played as pervasively on a per capita basis than the steelpan is in T&T.

That, surely, is convincing evidence of renewable wealth.

Last week, I also proposed that one of the key factors with the potential to refute the "renewable" argument was chronic reliance on key non-indigenous inputs such as the drums themselves.

Akua Leith, who now chairs our country’s Steelpan Geographical Indication Board, does not agree. I had promised last week to come back to this and an interview with him helped bring further perspective to the argument.

He does not regard access to drums and other manufacturing materials as an existential threat.

Manufacturers can easily source inputs internationally – from more than one reliable source. His greater concern is precisely the same resource I have considered to be the least problematic – the people.

The Steelpan of Trinidad and Tobago

Who will make the pans? Who will tune them? Who will carry the knowledge forward? Who will regard manufacturing not as some quaint, exotic pastime but as a respectable and rewarding career?

Leith’s concerns reflect genuine challenges. But they are hardly evidence of impending extinction. Indeed, the evidence points in the opposite direction.

Young people are still entering the creative world of pan in large numbers. Spend time with some of our more reputable bands and have a look at their child and junior band programmes.

There you’ll find music education, instrument handling, playing skills, mentorship, and support in other areas of need.

Younger players are teaching others. Teaching institutions and manufacturers are discussing closer relationships.

Contemporary musical arrangements delivered by young people are bringing new audiences to the instrument.

We have also acquired a geographical indication, giving us a mechanism for protecting the authenticity and quality of locally made steelpans. This can serve to stimulate greater awareness of intellectual property value.

Dr Savitri Rampersad has meanwhile been exploring the potential of pan sound itself as a wellness resource. She has argued that the instrument’s unique, distinctive sound could have applications in a trillion-dollar global wellness industry.

If there can be any significant danger, therefore, it is not that pan will disappear or that we will somehow run out of creative imagination.

It can however be threatened if it is deliberately starved, marginalised, and otherwise suppressed.

Pan does not need to be rescued from its apparent future. The natural course of events has taken it forward. It needs to be protected from some of us.

Rickey Singh: A Voice for the Caribbean

                                                                 Wesley Gibbings

Caribbean Broadcasting Union

57^th Annual General Assembly

Georgetown, Guyana

Wednesday August 19, 2026

Distinguished delegates of the Caribbean Broadcasting Union, honoured guests, members of the Singh family, media comrades, ladies and gentlemen.

We gather today in Georgetown - on the very soil from which Rickey Singh came  - to do something that is, in truth, somewhat overdue but yet perfectly timed.

We are assembled to honour a remarkable Caribbean journalist -Rickey Singh - and to celebrate his induction into the Caribbean Broadcasting Union Hall of Fame at a time when journalistic skill and judgment are indispensably required to make sense of so much that is around us.

It is thus abundantly evident that this tribute represents more than commendations in support of an award. It is about memory as constructed through first and second drafts of history. It is about public service through the journalistic creed to seek and speak truth.

And it is about the responsibility of those who use words to help people understand themselves.

In our region and beyond, there are few better human representations of such pursuits than our late colleague.

Guyana, from whence he came, has always been a country shaped by water. Yes, the often turbulent, even deadly Atlantic. But equally so its rivers that carry more than boats and commerce but also chapters of memory.

The Demerara, the Berbice and the Essequibo and all their various tributaries have witnessed empire, slavery, emancipation, indentureship, political struggle, and independence.

They have carried pain and sorrow from one generation to another, but they have also borne hope and aspirations. So too have the blades of grass and the trees reaching towards our so often troubled skies.

It was from such a landscape, and its accompanying peoplescape, a young Rickey Singh emerged.

He was born in Canal Number Two Polder – an agricultural community across the bridge about an hour away from here nowadays - on February 1, 1937. He lost his father before he had the opportunity to know him, and his mother while he was still a boy.

Such losses can harden a human being. Such circumstances, in the face of a changing and troubled world, and at that time in the throes of global military conflict, can harden hearts and make people indifferent to human need and suffering.

In Rickey’s case, they seem instead to have deepened compassion. This is reflected in his clear and persistent understanding of the loneliness of the vulnerable and the quiet courage of ordinary people.

His mother, Jessie, had spoken out for women whose work was undervalued and whose dignity was too easily overlooked. She understood something that her son would carry throughout his own life: that injustice does not become acceptable simply because it has become customary or widely ignored.

For more than six decades, Rickey Singh continued the conversation his mother had begun through his journalism, his activism, and his interpersonal relationships, with all due scepticism, strong personal convictions, and an unbending sense of right and wrong.

He carried such a predisposition from the cane fields to newspaper offices, from government buildings to CARICOM summits, from the Caribbean to the wider world, all connected through the veins of history.

Presidents and prime ministers heard, and most times, listened to him. Diplomats understood where he was coming from and often referenced him. Journalists listened to him and some wanted to be like him. But so too did ordinary citizens of the Caribbean pay attention to Rickey - people who wanted someone to tell them honestly what was happening in the world around them.

Martin Carter once wrote:

“I do not sleep to dream, but dream to change the world.”

Those words speak to something fundamental about Rickey Singh. His journalism was never content merely to observe and report on the Caribbean. He wanted, through his work, to change the way we understood it - and, in doing so, to change the way we understood our responsibilities to one another.

For Rickey, journalism was never a comfortable seat from which to watch history pass. It was participation. It was active citizenship.

Carter gave us another brief but powerful reminder: “All are involved!”

Rickey Singh understood that instinctively. He knew that an election in Guyana could alter political thinking in Barbados. He knew that a constitutional crisis in Jamaica mattered in Port of Spain. He understood that the pain of Grenada, the uncertainty of Suriname, the aspirations of Belize, and the trials of Haiti were not foreign matters.

They were part of the same Caribbean story. To him, the newsroom dichotomy of so-called local and regional news was a fiction that omitted critical elements of a united Caribbean paradigm. Think of this in 2026. Take a minute to reflect on how correct he was.

Indeed, such consciousness frames the quality of his journalism. Some reported what had happened. Rickey asked what it meant. Others described the crisis of the day. Rickey searched for its causes and its consequences. Others pursued the headline and the deadline. Rickey followed its impact on human history.

He began as a young reporter at the Guiana Graphic, where the newsroom became for him a classroom, a family, and a platform from which to serve the public.

Very early, he recognised something that many of us take much longer to get: the Caribbean cannot be understood one territory, one island or one headline at a time.

The sea does not merely separate us. It connects us. The sky in its limitlessness establishes borderlessness and common ownership.

That conviction found perhaps its most eloquent expression in the title of his celebrated newspaper column: Our Caribbean. The title itself is declarative of a region that belongs to all of us.

That the farmer in St Elizabeth, the fisherman in Gouyave, the teacher in Castries, the hunters of the Rupunini Savannahs, the steelpan arranger in Port of Spain - all belong to the same larger story.

Rickey Singh invited us to see the region not as a collection of fragments, but as a community with shared responsibilities. In the story of the parts, he saw a sum that was greater even than the whole.

In that sense, his journalism reflected the profound insights of another great Guyanese, Wilson Harris. Harris spoke of the “creative fusion” of what is absent and what is present.

That is also what serious journalism does. It searches for people and experiences that power chronically ignores. It listens for the voices that do not always enter official records.

It understands that a country is not defined only by its leaders, its declarations and its ceremonies. It is also defined by workers, farmers, families, migrants, communities, and citizens whose experiences may never otherwise find their way into the official account.

Rickey’s recognition of this was reflected in his belief in the assertion of human rights as both universal and indivisible. His foundational activity with the Caribbean Human Rights Network proved the point at a time, such as now, when rights had slid, almost silently, off the agenda of indispensable developmental assets.

The recently-launched Rickey Singh Initiative for Excellence in Journalism by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) establishes important links connecting Rickey’s journalism, his human rights advocacy, and his sense of a hemispheric space within which the Caribbean does not reside at the margins.

There is a lesson for every journalist as Rickey at his often-irascible best would contend that no single article, including those produced by him, can contain the whole truth of a society.

No reporter can explain every dimension of a crisis. But every honest account can contribute another piece to our understanding. These parts that are greater than the whole.

Derek Walcott reminded us that if we break a vase, we often realise that “the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.”

Rickey Singh understood that journalism requires us to keep asking, keep listening, and keep searching for the missing pieces in order to re-assemble them.

At Caribbean Contact, which is where I first met him, he helped create a regional meeting place for ideas. It was a publication with limited resources but an enormous purpose.

There is a current effort to have Rickey’s collection of every edition of the newspaper digitised, stored, and made available to all generations for all time. In my view, this would constitute an enduring tribute not only to a late, great Caribbean editor but to an effort to engrave independent journalism as part of our region’s institutional landscape.

Though I am aware of interest by a Canadian university, here is an assignment for a Caribbean institution - as part of a greater effort to capture memory as provided by mass media.

With the great mentor and journalistic exemplar

You see, from the Port of Spain office of Caribbean Contact, Rickey helped give shape to a regional conversation about politics, faith, social justice, democracy, and Caribbean identity.

And he did something else that is perhaps even more important. He helped other people find their voices. Many young journalists and writers discovered their possibilities because Rickey Singh encouraged them. He saw potential before others saw achievement. I was part of one such cohort in the early 1980s.

He understood that editing was not merely about correcting grammar or improving structure but also about cultivating confidence and context, rooted in unique Caribbean realities.

He did not merely publish stories. He nurtured storytellers. That is a profound part of his legacy, that he helped construct a community of Caribbean journalists – one that needed to be cherished and protected.

Then at the Caribbean News Agency (CANA) he partnered with and helped mentor many of today’s media leaders and accomplished practitioners.

Rickey didn't merely compose and publish Caribbean journalism; he helped build the institutional structures through which Caribbean journalists could work collectively.

As founding President of the Caribbean Association of Media Workers, he helped give practical meaning to regional solidarity among media professionals, and brought meaning to freedom of the press even as media development required a stronger, more socially aware cadre of professionals.

Significantly, he understood that press freedom required collective action that transcended territorial lines. The threats faced by journalists do not stop at national borders, and therefore the defence of journalism must cross those borders as well.

Martin Carter had by then provided stark context in the admonition that “a mouth is always muzzled by the food it eats to live.” Through this, the lessons of silence achieved through fear and dependence found expression in the inaugural tenets of the CAMWORK mandate.

Rickey Singh provided a living example of the costs of resistance. His criticism of authoritarianism in Guyana placed him in personal danger. Elsewhere in the region, work permits became problematic mainly because his commentary was inconvenient to those who preferred praise to scrutiny.

Exile, uncertainty, and official displeasure became familiar companions. Yet he continued. Those of us who communicated with him knew he was not prepared to address intolerance through hatred. He answered it with persistence and a refusal to surrender to self-censorship.

There he was: asking the difficult questions and insisting on public accountability even as the region he loved navigated some of its most difficult chapters.

He chronicled the overthrow of Sir Eric Gairy and the revolutionary promise that captivated Grenada. He reported on the murder of Maurice Bishop and the violence that followed in October 1983.

He wrote courageously about the assassination of Walter Rodney and refused to allow difficult questions to be buried beneath official explanations.

He covered the attempted coup in Trinidad and Tobago in 1990 with constitutional democracy as a central theme of his reporting. And, most of all, there appeared to be an understanding – which remains true today - that these were not isolated emergencies or single country events.

The honour was mine to speak on the contributions of Rickey Singh

Breaking news we are all taught is there as a first interpretation of occurrences that eventually become history. Journalism, against such a backdrop, is required to go beyond accounts of what happened.

It should anticipate the questions that future generations will need to ask. Wilson Harris once explained that “the block imprints of history need to be re-opened…” History, his work suggested, is not a static artifact but a living entity that requires re-opening and re-packaging.

Such is an essential role of journalists. We are charged, so often, with re-opening the past and reviewing official versions. In it lies a duty to ask difficult questions about who was heard. Who was ignored. Who paid the price.

True, we often get this wrong. Rickey knew this well, and he was usually willing to acknowledge such a shortcoming in his own practice. Yet, his value to others was the admonition to never allow history to become a closed chapter.

Few understood this better than a cadre of regional journalists who roamed alongside Rickey as they trailed presidents and prime ministers from capital to capital. Building journalistic memory and calling out discrepancies wherever they found them.

But they were not members of any official entourage. They were there as journalists, accountable to audiences interested in public disclosure and truth-telling. Rickey earned our respect not through any acts of arrogance but through experience and integrity.

Less experienced journalists listened to him because he understood that credibility is accumulated slowly - one report, one correction, one difficult decision at a time. And perhaps that is why his legacy is especially relevant now.

Today’s world of instant news and information – packaged in sizes fit for single bites – challenges such a mandate as never before. Rumour can reach thousands before facts have been checked. Opinion is routinely presented as evidence. Technology can amplify truth - but it can also amplify falsehood just as efficiently.

However, core journalistic principles remain exactly the same – verification, fairness, balance, and a disciplined effort to keep personal bias from distorting the account.

Had Rickey been with us this evening, he would have enlivened this assembly not with a discourse on the impact of technology, but with an examination of how facts and truth remain constant fixtures on our journalistic agendas.

Speaking of technology, some of us here this evening would recall CANA’s introduction of Tandy PCs in the 1980s and Rickey’s rather proud and conspicuous proficiency at conference news centres. So, it cannot be said he was among the Luddite generation with a prolonged preference for manual and electronic typewriters.  

Yet, he would be clear that while technology changes. Ethics do not. Platforms change but the obligation to verify remains.

The courage to question remains. The discipline to listen remains alongside the humility to correct errors. And the responsibility to place the public interest above personal advancement remains. Rickey paid a high price for the latter.

I spoke earlier about Walcott’s fragments. But from those fragments, Caribbean people created new communities, new languages, new music, new traditions, and new ways of belonging.

The impact of Caribbean journalism can help gather those fragments, re-assemble them even. Rickey’s newspaper columns, addressed most of these aspirations.

He reminded us that the Caribbean’s strength lies not in pretending that our differences do not exist, but in learning to understand them. Walcott gave us another beautiful phrase: “All of the Antilles, every island, is an effort of memory.”

That is also a way of thinking about journalism. Every accurate article is an effort of memory. Every careful broadcast is an attempt to prevent people and events from disappearing. Every interview preserves some fragment of public life that might otherwise be forgotten.

Walcott spoke, too, of “islands not written about but writing themselves.” Rickey Singh was one of those writers who helped the Caribbean write itself.

He wrote about politics, certainly. But he also wrote about people. He understood that public life is not made only in parliaments and conference rooms.

It is made in villages and markets, schools and farms, churches and studios, newsrooms and family homes. He understood that the history of the region lives in ordinary experience.

He did not belong only to one country. He belonged to the Caribbean.

And there comes a moment in every life devoted to public service when achievement begins to give way to legacy. Not because the work is finished. But because the work has passed into the hands of others.

There is where Rickey Singh’s work now resides. It rests with the journalist who refuses to change a story because a minister objects. It rests with the editor who insists that facts matter more than convenience.

It rests with the broadcaster who asks one more difficult question. It rests with the young reporter who understands that public trust is more valuable than personal popularity.

Martin Carter gave us the words: “Death must not find us thinking that we die.” Those words fit today’s proceedings. Because Rickey Singh’s voice has not disappeared. It lives in the standards he defended. It lives in the journalists he mentored. It lives in the institutions he helped build. It lives in the questions his work taught us to ask.

As we gather here in Georgetown  - where the Atlantic meets the rivers, and where so many Caribbean journeys have begun - let us return to the image with which we began.

The rivers continue their patient movement. They join distant places without asking permission. They carry memory - quietly and persistently towards the sea. Truth moves in much the same way. It may be delayed. It may be obstructed. It may be denied. But if people are willing to protect it, truth continues to find a way forward.

For more than six decades, the people of the Caribbean entrusted Rickey Singh with their stories. There can be no higher calling for a journalist. And there can be no finer tribute.

Today, therefore, we honour not simply a journalist. We honour a regionalist. A teacher. A mentor. A builder of institutions. A defender of press freedom. And, above all, a guardian of truth.

Rickey Singh gave his life to the Caribbean. And the Caribbean is richer because of it.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Pan’s renewable wealth

So, World Steelpan Day was observed yesterday, and we are in the midst of Steelpan Month.

By now we should all know that the instrument is much more than the music it delivers. That we frequently need to step back and ask ourselves: What in the manner in which we have clumsily begun to assemble a nation complete with intrigue, eternal conflict, and chronic confusion, have we done to deserve so handsome a bounty?

What exactly have we really done by creating this musical instrument here?

The answer, I propose, is not simply the development of a remarkable musical instrument. Nor is it merely the spectacle of Panorama or various spectacles throughout the year that fill venues and excite communities and people wherever and whenever they assemble here and all over the world.

This space has been frequently employed to propose value that extends to the productive mobilisation of human resources, creation of a model for social organisation, and establishment of a unique pathway for the generation of national wealth.

The fact is we have produced one of the world's most extraordinary renewable resources. It is not, sadly, that there generally exists in T&T any particular penchant for the sustainable. We have, as a nation, thrived on the expendable to the extent that when regenerative options present themselves, they are all too easily discarded.

But more on solar farms fed by a limitless input and expendable carbon resources at another time.

Exodus Steel Orchestra - Winners Panorama 2026

And, yes, I repeat for the umpteenth time my 40-year-old question to the late (great) journalist, Keith Smith, as we took a cigarette break along Independence Square: “When the oil is gone, what else do we have to keep us going?” (“Groan”).

And an identical query put to late energy guru, Barry Barnes, who responded that for as long as the planet remains viable, the oil and gas will continue to flow.

But the point of the questions was never really about hydrocarbons. It was about national imagination and wealth creation transcendent of the long-recognised and known. What, we now ask far more frontally, can we build that cannot run dry?

An answer appears to have lingered before us, without acknowledgement over all these years.

Less than a year ago, while paying tribute to pan revolutionary, Jit Samaroo, and referencing the great pan innovators, tuners, players and arrangers over the years, I suggested that the steelpan is one of the greatest available tools to have converted adversity into enduring national resources.

Think of it as an economic asset emerging from people with few material resources but with what has been manifest as unmatched ingenuity.

Its evolution created not only an instrument but entire systems of knowledge. Some essential ingredients include tuning, blending, arranging, composing, performing, teaching, organising and innovating.

Generation after generation has added to that inheritance without apparently exhausting it. If you have stuck around long enough you would have witnessed never-ending transitions. Renewal in its purest manifestation through the people who comprise the steelpan community.

Unlike oil and gas, every time we invest in pan, we increase the reserves. Isn’t this what renewable wealth looks like?

This is more than a steelpan and sticks on the national coat of arms – now subject to official indifference. It is getting to the root of important social, cultural, and economic conditions that may conduce to our advancement as a people.

A notion of national wealth must include a sense of economic potential especially in ways that are sustainable over the long-term. By associating such potential with provably beneficial elements such as capacity in steelpan manufacturing, enhancing the tourism experience, providing exclusive training grounds, and leading new initiatives in research and development.

As the indisputable Mecca of Pan, T&T cannot allow this momentous opportunity to pass. Happy Steelpan Month!

POST-SCRIPT: I join with the many others who are lamenting the loss of artistic genius, Willi Chen, in recognising his valuable contribution to Caribbean art in virtually all its facets. More than once, his work reflected the value of pan.

“But now we have triumphed with the steel pan as our renowned musical instrument indigenous of the century; through years of dedicated practice, and continuous innovative approaches, to make the invention more sophisticatedly improved, for the sonorous delicacy of its melodious rapture, the most cherished musical instrument in the modern world - our steel pan” – Willi Chen, Trinidad and Tobago Guardian July 20, 2011.

The survival game

One of the mistakes we make in assessing the value of the CARICOM project is to regard socio-cultural solidarity as its sole asset.

Such cohesion matters, certainly. It underpins regional integration everywhere, providing a foundation for collective action. But integration aimed at common development requires far more. It demands practical cooperation, particularly among small states confronting entrenched vulnerabilities and limited room for manoeuvre.

Despite occasional delusional pronouncements from some Caribbean capitals, if CARICOM did not exist today we would have had to conjure it out of a mangled mess.

Former CARICOM Assistant Secretary General Joseph Cox more or less makes that case in his latest Caribbean Financial Dispatch editorial, adding that operational effectiveness can hugely determine whether integration succeeds or fails.

He frames his analysis around challenges that both member states and the regional bureaucracy appear increasingly ill-equipped to manage, foremost among them being the need for urgent recognition of the imbalance between small Caribbean states and global power and the required remedies.

We are hardly unique in confronting this. Regional organisations worldwide are acknowledging the necessity of greater transparency and institutional resilience while recognising that short-term national politics cannot substitute for coherent long-term regional strategy.

CARICOM's 15 Full Members

Recent statements from Port of Spain appear insufficiently mindful of that reality. Caribbean leadership should strengthen public confidence in our capacity to pursue integrated development based on shared history, interests and values, not undermine it.

Very often, CARICOM has, with some justification, been criticised as bureaucratic, excessively ponderous and slow on implementation. Cox examines these shortcomings from the perspective of someone who served at a senior level within the system.

Yet institutions should not be judged solely by their imperfections, but also by the circumstances that produced them and the challenges they were created to address.

Much of the early literature on such matters portrayed CARICOM mainly as an expression of Caribbean idealism. Equally persuasive, though, is the view that it emerged as an instrument of Caribbean survival.

Former CARICOM Deputy Secretary General Professor Kenneth Hall sought to establish this when he led a series of publications and multimedia initiatives - some of which I was professionally associated with - under the banner “Integrate or Perish.”

He appeared to believe that the phrase captured the Community's essential purpose - even as many preferred more romantic narratives of Caribbean unity rooted in shared indigenous identities.

The publication of Integrate or Perish (2000) was followed by The Caribbean Community Beyond Survival (2001), which assembled reflections from many of the region's leading thinkers. Together they argued essentially that integration was not simply desirable, but indispensable.

Cox advances that argument. He suggests that this survival project has quietly lost diplomatic and political capital because member states have come to expect progressively less from it.

Increasingly, governments are responding to common external pressures through national rather than regional strategies, effectively discounting the value of collective action.

If that diagnosis is correct, it represents far more than an institutional problem. It is a strategic miscalculation that extends well beyond the Caribbean Court of Justice's forthcoming consideration of issues surrounding the reappointment of the CARICOM Secretary General.

The uncomfortable truth is that the external pressures confronting Caribbean societies have become more integrated than Caribbean policymaking itself.

Whether the challenge is geo-political conflict, correspondent banking, anti-money laundering standards, climate finance, food security, maritime transport or a just transition away from fossil fuels, no Caribbean country possesses sufficient economic or diplomatic weight to shape these developments alone.

None of us.

The mathematics of international affairs have not become kinder to small states. They have become far less forgiving.

This is where T&T occasionally risks misunderstanding its own place within the Community. Decades of relative prosperity - now under considerable strain - have sometimes fostered the illusion that national interests can be pursued independently of our Caribbean neighbours.

Yet our manufacturers depend on regional markets. Our security increasingly relies on intelligence cooperation (some of which is currently farmed out overseas). Our energy future is shaped by global environmental policy. Our food security is inseparable from regional supply chains and transport networks.

Our fortunes are becoming more, not less, interdependent. Expanded relations may complement but certainly not replace the core. Why do we have to learn this the hard way? Even CARICOM sceptic, former Jamaica PM Bruce Golding has recently been sounding an alarm on the subject.

External pressures rarely remain confined to their original targets. They spread, deepen and multiply. Caribbean solidarity must do the same. Not as an expression of nostalgia, but as an exercise in survival.

1990 – Memory and Myth

It is good that we turn annually to the attempted coup d'état in Trinidad and Tobago – often reduced to the shorthand “events of 1990” - to recall the epochal physical, emotional, and social violence experienced 36 years ago.

Through the haze of fast-moving time, there remains much to address from a space occupied by fact, trauma, and nurtured myths.

Only once since have I publicly offered personal reflections arising from my own experience as a journalist sitting at the press table in Parliament at 6.00 p.m. on Friday July 27, 1990.

I asked, in these pages on July 26, 2017: “1990 – Did we look for it?”

Before that, I had remained largely silent, apart from an enlightened but under-reported session hosted by MATT some years later. I chose instead to observe the competing narratives including those advanced by former colleagues.

The unreliability of memory is often influenced by ignorance, personal bias, mischief, and emotion.

Late journalist/hostage Raoul Pantin's
insightful account of what happened

However, having traversed the period once again over the past few days, we can now focus on the first post-coup sitting of the House of Representatives on August 10, 1990. For, what transpired immediately after the siege is also important.

The session was held at the Central Bank Auditorium under tight security. The press sat in that unusual setting as though attending the staging of a Raoul Pantin play.

What struck me was that the sharp political rhetoric of the period - much of it directed at the collapse of the NAR administration. This had continued throughout and after the crisis.

Some speakers compared the violent attack with the 1970 Black Power unrest. The late Basdeo Panday, then minority opposition leader - who had remained largely silent during the crisis - introduced the concept of political “alienation.”

But the looting and destruction in Port of Spain in 1990 could not reasonably be equated with the broad social movement and national transformation associated with 1970. Nor could it be compared with the conditions that produced accompanying changes.

Yet such arguments were heard as Parliament considered an extension of an existing state of emergency. Unlike today, few informed professionals seriously questioned its legitimacy relative to constitutional requirements.

Panday is recorded in the Hansard as saying: “They (government) brought this nation to where it is by their treachery.” The implication was clear: that the government had, in some way, “looked for it.”

Over time, through rhetoric of this kind, many came to interpret the murderous attack not as a narrow conflict between the Jamaat al Muslimeen and the state, but as an expression of wider political discontent.

Attorney General Anthony Smart had attempted to introduce the debate above party politics, asking the House to view the violence as “an attack on the democracy of this country” and not a partisan issue.

Opposition Leader Patrick Manning responded that he was “not in a particularly combative mood” though this posture did not hold throughout his contribution.

Opposition MP Kelvin Ramnath, unlike Manning and Panday, had himself been a hostage and had genuine grievances about the treatment of survivors. Yet he used his contribution to allege a plot to allow hostages to die so that the government could “organise a counter right wing coup.”

Trevor Sudama, who had been wounded and held throughout the siege, raised legitimate questions about the delayed declaration of a state of emergency and called for accountability.

Manning also asked about the accumulation of arms and ammunition used by the insurgents.

But there is a difference between demanding accountability and using catastrophe as a platform for political grievance.

Prime Minister ANR Robinson had been seriously wounded and was absent for the sitting. I had heard, more than once, the view expressed that he should have died. There was no sharp condemnation of such statements from major opinion leaders then and even now.

Others did die. Families mourned. Soldiers guarded a legislature at the Central Bank because the parliamentary chamber had been damaged.

In that setting, scoring political points was not principled opposition. It was politics dressed up as democratic vigilance.

Our current reality suggests that, across the political divide, we have not learned enough from this.

The Report of the Commission of Enquiry into the 1990 attempted coup includes (in vain) recommendations on legislative reform, amnesty provisions, and ex gratia compensation for victims and their families.

It also acknowledges the significant damage suffered by targeted downtown businesses. Someday, have a look at who the owners were. Then look at the full picture and see how much of 1990 resembles 2026.

Trust and AI infrastructure

Current public anxiety surrounding the establishment of AI data centres in T&T appears to be emerging from multiple phenomena.

There is first - and not to be ignored - a general, irrational mystique surrounding the value and quality of generative AI and its constituent components. Somebody messaged me last week with a simple query: “Cell tower debate again?”

There is however an accompanying absence of public trust in the conduct of state business. There are questions regarding where, precisely, such projects are situated on the country’s development agenda, especially given their prior absence. And there are also broad socio-economic questions to be addressed.

There is now a recognisable convergence of these discrete elements of the current AI data centre challenge.

The increasingly popular Syam Nath petition quite rationally addresses the specific issue of water usage. AI data centres are not, you see, ordinary warehouses for data. They are resource-intensive facilities that require comparably far more energy and cooling than other plants.

The petition also significantly includes a general appeal for “responsible planning, transparency, and evidence-based decision-making” when projects with implications for environmental instability – the management of water resources in this case - are being considered.

Yes, the petition has attracted some exaggerated fears over AI itself, but it also tangentially addresses the key questions of trust and the way orderly economic progress needs to be engaged, albeit with a primary focus on ecological viability. There are also broader socio-economic considerations that deserve attention.

We are no newcomers to such questions. For instance, our energy sector has over recent decades confronted questions of the contribution of industry-generated carbon emissions to global climate change.

This country is currently part of a wider, hugely challenging, effort to balance economic benefit against what scientists conclude is a need to reduce the carbon footprints of all countries. Few periods have presented comparable developmental dilemmas for nations such as ours.

They certainly did not arise when the first oilwell was excavated over 100 years ago, nor were there such questions in the boom years of the 1970s.

To emphasise this, the energy sector, in Guyana is indispensably assisting in the achievement of an unprecedented level of socio-economic development.

That neighbour’s language on the achievement of global carbon targets has thus become far more temperate than previous non-oil years, even when T&T was both tacitly and openly giving expression to the dilemma.

The question has become one of “net benefit” rather than of absolute hazard. The concept of “net-zero (carbon) emissions” and accompanying measures in part capture the quandary through tabulation of a notion of global “balance.” The activities of AI data centres have also recently joined the emissions discussion.

The focus for us, I would suggest, should be on net potential benefits based on science and transparency. None of the larger producers has completely abandoned their energy industries, even those who are benefactors in the framing of a new way forward.

Raising related questions on AI data centres should not, however, be dismissed through condescension or insult. These issues arise partly because of a sense that development is being engaged by “vaps” and improvisation.

Although there is now a Ministry of Artificial Intelligence - which is largely concerned with integrating digital tools into public administration - there is informed opinion suggesting that merely hosting AI infrastructure is not the same as pursuing national AI capacity.

To address this would require an answer to the question of whether the proposed projects can serve as the foundation of a sovereign, nationally controlled language model serving governance and, eventually, the public.

The difference between the latter and the mere hosting of remote facilities is enormous, and the country cannot meaningfully debate scope, risk, or net benefit until it knows which objective is to be pursued and the scientific metrics involved.

There is, meanwhile, no reason to needlessly hammer prospective partners. Hummingbird AI, for instance, has openly declared its interest as a corporate entity with a capacity to “originate, structure, finance and deliver nationally significant AI infrastructure projects.” Fair enough.

There is little doubt that the significant investment involved can and will, at least in the short term, generate the benefits of foreign currency inflows, jobs, skills acquisition, and infrastructure development.

There remain technical, contractual, and operational details, however, that should be disclosed, under conditions of full transparency to the public so that a rational assessment of net benefit can be made. There are undeniable pluses and minuses.

We are not there yet. Until we are, there is nothing unreasonable about identifying and debating the principal areas of concern.

 

Unfinished Caricom business

It has become absurdly fashionable in some circles to dismiss Caricom as a wasteful, irrelevant enterprise worthy of dissolution and relegation to the garbage bin of history.

Over the years, I have realised that even greater than the malice generated by false notions of socio-cultural, geographic and other forms of inherent individual strength and weakness is the pervasive ignorance surrounding the nature of the institution our community of nations has built, and the misplaced expectations that accompany it.

The process of “leaving” Caricom is more than getting up in disgust in the middle of an unsatisfactory stage performance. For, while doing so, attachments to various appurtenances of the theatre, including the main stage and other pieces of infrastructure, including the ceiling, do not remain undisturbed.

Over the past 53 years of Caricom, its mandates and institutional responses have grown to extensive and diverse degrees. There are now, for instance, almost 30 specialised and complementary autonomous and semi-autonomous institutions that serve as key pillars of the integration process.

I have offered the reminder numerous times that, among these institutions, is the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ), headquartered in Port of Spain.

It serves as the legal forum through which 12 member states, including T&T, may resolve disputes arising from the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas. This is the mechanism now being invoked at T&T’s insistence in relation to the appointment of the Caricom Secretary-General.

Attorney General John Jeremie is familiar with CCJ processes, having appeared as attorney for Trinidad Cement Ltd in the 2022 case against the government of T&T. He also appeared, together with Keith Scotland and others, as counsel in a matter - [2022] CCJ 15 (AJ) GY - involving the appellate jurisdiction of the court at the height of the 2020 post-election debacle in Guyana.

Though the court currently serves as the court of final appeal for five member states: Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Guyana, and Saint Lucia, our country has, in this regard, been very much “in the CCJ”, albeit through other means.

The recent July 7 appellate judgment of the CCJ, to cite another example – [2026] CCJ 8 (AJ) BZ – features the prominent involvement of former Attorney General Anand Ramlogan in an election boundaries case related to Belize.

There are professionals far more qualified than I to challenge the nonsense surrounding T&T's alleged non-engagement with the court – “we not in the CCJ” - and I remain surprised that the Law Association has never undertaken a rigorous public awareness campaign to address this endemic ignorance, even at senior levels.

Among things to also be considered in the “get up and leave” sentiment is the fact that Caricom “entanglements” include intimate involvement in major institutions including the Caribbean Public Health Agency (CARPHA) - which played a leading role in the COVID-19 pandemic - and the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency (CDEMA), to name just two.

Also consider the roles of the Caricom Implementation Agency for Crime and Security (IMPACS), the Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC), and the Caribbean Agricultural Research and Development Institute (CARDI).

There are others that play leading roles in important areas such as climate change, telecommunications, renewable energy, regional standards and quality setting, tourism, fisheries, and meteorology.

Now, if you find the time ahead of the World Cup Final, have a look at the communiqué emerging from the 51st Caricom Heads meeting in Saint Lucia last week.

There, you will find joint reflections on some of the more urgent matters of today, not the least being Caribbean's vulnerabilities and hazards that are transnational in nature. Consider the impact on our southern coastline from the earthquakes in Venezuela.

Hurricanes also do not respect maritime boundaries. Criminal networks move across jurisdictions. Climate finance negotiations are conducted in global fora where numbers matter. Digital transformation cannot be addressed through fragmented national policies. Food insecurity is shaped by conflicts occurring thousands of miles away.

Implicit in these observations alone, you find that the argument for integration has become stronger, not weaker.

At a time of deep geopolitical turbulence, climate vulnerability, democratic uncertainty and technological disruption, the proposition that some of us should somehow retreat from integration is not merely mistaken. It is absurd.

Importantly, and as I pointed out last week right here, the politics of integration do not match the energy and aspirations of young people and ordinary citizens.

The Caricom project also includes a considerable workload of unfinished business – most of which is specifically relevant to our ability to engage current and emerging challenges. We are horsing around with this at our peril, T&T!