Our precious pan nurseries

By the time you read this, our country would have already experienced one of the most beautiful, high-quality, and popular events on the seasonal calendar.

Both editions of Junior Panorama excelled when considering the music presented - the Ministry of Education’s National Schools Panorama Finals at Skinner Park, and the Pan Trinbago Junior Panorama contests comprising Under-19 and Under-21 bands at the Queen’s Park Savannah.

Unlike the QPS version, I was out of the country and had to follow Monday’s event online. As was the case on Sunday in Port of Spain, I looked not only for musical skill, but also for the degree to which hard work, diligence, and joy were evident.

These are qualities not unique to the steelpan but are par for the course whenever steelbands assemble to show audiences what they have.

People who remain sceptical about the value of the instrument as a national asset should try to attend at least one steelband event - the Schools/Junior Panorama in particular. It should be a requirement for everyone in decision-making positions when it comes to pan.

Isabella Camacho played bass with Legacy of the Saints in the Under-19 category

Minister of Education, Dr Michael Dowlath, appeared to recognise such value at the draw for positions last Friday, when he raised the issue of music education, including the teaching of pan music, in the holistic development of children. This is important.

But he could have gone further in acknowledging the unique qualities of the instrument, its indigenous antecedents, and the model of social organisation in which it thrives.

Currently on the table is a promise to engage in post-Panorama consultations to ensure that this year’s mishap involving the choice of venue for the Junior Panorama Finals does not recur.

This confusion led to anger and dismay in some quarters, quiet resignation in others, and the sad disappointment of many children.

It might be that two separate events, with support from both the MOE and Pan Trinbago, can occur in the future. There is nothing wrong with a schedule involving both venues. But the best of the secondary schools, whatever the respective monikers, should be given the chance to contest and compare, at whichever venue.

For example, the Pan Trinbago Small Bands Final was hosted, without fuss, at Skinner Park and comprised bands from both islands — north, south, east, and west.

I did not hear a single word about Skinner Park being “too far”. In any case, too far from where? What I did hear, when it came to the secondary school bands, was that notice of the venue reached schools too late, and that there were serious issues associated with logistics and cost. I have no reason to believe the complaints were trivial or designed to jeopardise the MOE event.

It eventually fell to Pan Trinbago to fill what would have been a terrible breach when the organisation was approached to do something about the prospect of numerous bands not having a performance space. At that point, the Under-19 contest was born.

Hopefully, both parties will recognise the resultant problem of school-based bands not being exposed to competition at the highest level, involving the best the school steelband landscape has to offer.

So, if competition 2027 talks are convened promptly and in good faith, it should not matter what is eventually determined as the best arrangement for the students, and for pan.

Among the influential factors would be Pan Trinbago’s undoubted organisational capacity, its pioneering, tried-and-tested template for such events, and the influence of a government ministry in making numerous things happen through access to state resources.

From the feedback, the ministry could have done with some Pan Trinbago assistance on Monday.

In the end, two critically important issues are at stake. The first, and more important, is the interest of the thousands of young people directly and indirectly associated with pan and the competition.

Invaders Youth won in the Under-21 group

The second has to do with supporting the development and growth of the steelpan as a key national resource.

The contests play a role in erasing several mistaken notions about the quality of our young people, of all backgrounds, and what they bring to the table. It is also now widely agreed that, no, young people are not moving away from pan.

As a pan lover and Panorama regular for most of my life, I hereby confess that Junior Panorama is my favourite and most emotionally stirring event when it comes to this wonderful instrument and all that comes with it.

Let’s please get this right. There are pan nurseries to be attended to and managed.

 

Landing the narrative

Sufficient to disclaim a once prominent charge (even from within) of a “single-story” agenda, our media have recently offered up a menu so diverse that observers with a genuine interest in exploring the more prominent highlights, now too often consider themselves hapless practitioners of negligent omission.

Latterly, the media industry itself – whatever the preoccupation with eluding our own front pages – has occupied the maze of confusions. The subject of survival did not have to reside in the column of sudden development, having long been the focus of critical, methodical scrutiny both from within and without.

For example, the largely ignored 2016 Caribbean media viability report of the Media Institute of the Caribbean (MIC) on Jamaican media, provided substantial guidance on most objective circumstances characteristic of the T&T Newsday crash, even in the face of eminently dismissible post-facto claims and assertions.

“What has happened to Newsday is not an isolated anomaly but part of a wider pattern of vulnerability and, increasingly, contraction,” the MIC (of which I am Vice President) said.

The last print copy of the Trinidad and Tobago Newsday

I have also seen submissions on the subject from media folks such as Julian Rogers and Joannah Bharose that more closely align with MIC’s deployment of research and informed analysis.

These dispatches also serve as counterpoints to the claim that media audiences are best served by naïve providers, paid and unpaid propagandists, and zealots who do not consider themselves bound by professional journalistic imperatives including (weighted) “balance” and pursuit of the truth.

Meanwhile, and not unrelatedly, we have an ongoing discourse on geopolitical realities that has been implanted through dangerously intimate engagement. Subject as it is to partisan fervour, there is certain to be confusion and discord, instead of reasoned debate and the pursuit of consensus.

“Sovereignty” is meanwhile selectively determined as factor and non-factor depending on the time of day or day of the week. So too, whom to love and whom to despise. Who is friend and who is foe. It all seems to depend on fickle political preference.

Then, right there on this endless menu, is the national economy. Through this you find rare consensus on untrammelled descent. Even when not so defined, witness the desperate ad hoc fervour to address a dire strait. Punishment and displacement defined as economic reward. Borrow, tax, and rearrange. What, indeed, is the plan?

This sits alongside inelastic relations between proclaimed lawlessness and authoritarian coercion, and a debasing of judicious prerogative in favour of inflexible retribution. It’s easy to get there once favourable crime statistics trump the pervasive presence of fear and when violent revenge is preferred over justice.

Not to be outdone, along came Monday’s Tobago House of Assembly elections – a cruel deadline prohibiting its upgrade to the point of exclusivity in today’s offering.

It was difficult through three short days there to suggest a forecast, save for the habitual durability of the status quo in the absence of visible, frenetic activism.

It would have been interesting to have explored the main factors behind the TPP’s sweeping victory. But by now you would have already had your fill of it.

There remain two promising things to add to today’s examination of the information maze: proposed amendments to the Maternity Protection Act (let’s leave the Retrenchment and Severance Benefits Act - RSBA - for now) and the conduct of this year’s steelband competitions.

The RSBA requires sole attention. I remember covering its early application in 1986 and the turbulent period in industrial relations history reminiscent, by some, of the watershed era of the 1930s. More on that another time.

The enlightened amendments to the MPA need further elaboration and analysis. The suggested changes appear, prima facie, to be in accordance with modern thinking on maternal and family rights – the latter concept fully resonant with a number of conventions establishing “family life” as a bedrock of civilised existence. I am hoping more specifics come to light as we proceed with this.

I did mention two “promising things.” The other is, of course, the fact that ongoing steelband competitions are reinforcing my view that pan is the single greatest and best thing we do. There is nothing else that comes close.

For the umpteenth time, it’s not just the music delivered. Here we have a model for social organisation and an avenue for generation of economic value that is tragically underestimated.

If you doubt me, head over to any panyard near where you live or work. Don’t judge only from the competitions – though Sunday’s Junior Panorama Finals should not be missed. When you’ve done that, then talk. Meanwhile, we have a crowded maze to negotiate.

Caricom bruised, not broken

It is increasingly apparent to me that whatever its operational deficiencies and political challenges – characteristic of all multilateral groupings - news of Caricom’s demise constitutes a gross exaggeration rooted in appalling, publicly exhibited ignorance of its structure, role, and functions.

Yes, breaches have widened along one critical pillar, but there remain other sturdy functioning structures. International relations expert Nand Bardouille’s suggestion of a widening Caricom “breach” is valid regarding the foundational pillars of foreign policy coordination, and associated regional security concerns, and cannot be dismissed.

However, past quarrels – Guyana, Grenada, Taiwan/China, Malvinas/Falklands – brought bruises and fractures, but nothing close to death.

It is also true, and not for the first time, the body blows have been bruising and extensive. Yet, there is no accompanying corpse - which would certainly include a gory exhibition of important T&T socio-cultural and economic organs and limbs.

For, who is sustaining the blows from whom? There is a certain nonsense about Caricom comprising a “them” and an “us.” It’s also there in the language that somehow “Caricom” comprises a monolithic “other.”

Regional political coordination is, by definition, a highly problematic pursuit. We may recall the early years that brought us Guyana’s chronic electoral challenges, the Grenada Revolution, and the embrace of Cuba as a regional partner.

We’ve also had the problematic embrace of Haiti as a member, the Taiwan/China divide, and differing perspectives on the Gaza genocide.

In this, all of us have at some point been unreliable allies on the consensus field. T&T stood its ground on the US invasion of Grenada in 1983. And let us not forget politely divided opinions surrounding the Falklands/Malvinas War in 1982.

On matters such as these we have not been alone. Who, indeed, is “the United Nations” or “the OAS” or “the EU” or “ECOWAS.”?

Among the more important issues explored by OAS Secretary General, Albert Ramdin in my recent interview with him were the numerous challenges to the process of multilateralism amid current global turbulence.

It concerns many that while all of this comes down to questions of defensive self-preservation, there has been a growing trend by countries – big and small, rich and poor, the powerful and the powerless – to  contemplate the dismantling of regional and global alliances designed to address conditions that conduce to peace, cooperation, and ensuing development gains.

The Ramdin interview unveiled real-life experiences associated with the OAS and its place as a hemispheric platform for the realisation of declared multilateral values.

He was able to cite the “ups and downs (of) the United Nations in the 1940s and the later crises of the 1960s and 1970s which were bilateral in nature, in the first instance, but later expanded to global levels.

Since then, everywhere, there have emerged regional integration arrangements such as Caricom to distil the dynamics of multilateralism in measures of collective geographical self-interest and to activate the potential of joint enterprise.

As explained in this space two weeks ago, the longstanding Caricom project is ambitiously multidimensional in nature with core mandates including economic integration, foreign policy coordination, human and social development, and security cooperation.

Its rules of engagement, especially in foreign policy, have never pretended to undervalue individual posture.

Despite this, there has been general consensus on international candidatures, and bloc representation in hemispheric and global decision-making. There is also the pursuit of a notion of open regionalism reliant on a high measure of policy coherence within Caricom.

“Not for the first time in their post-independence history, Caricom member states are mired in a foreign policy-related trajectory in which national and regional interests are pulling in opposite directions,” Dr Bardouille wrote recently.

In my view, the critical point to monitor would be the extent to which Caricom’s sometimes faltering foreign policy “pillar” teeters and destabilises other key structures.

Adjoin regional security and problematic foreign policy cohesion and witness what confronts the region now in the face of the US military attack on Venezuela and abduction of Nicolás Maduro and his wife. This was plainly a violation of international law.

The statement by the Caricom Bureau (comprising the heads of Jamaica, Saint Kitts and Nevis, and Saint Lucia) covers some essential points including “the fundamental principles of international law and multilateralism enshrined in the UN Charter, including sovereignty and territorial integrity of States and respect for human dignity.”

This is neither bland nor ideologically neutral. It is a useful guide. Propagandists and social media trolls had hoped for either congratulatory declarations or unqualified condemnation. That’s not how this works.

Here’s hoping all reliable regional partners meet and discuss even before the St Kitts and Nevis Summit next month. There are wounds, but none of them fatal.

A penalty of death

On December 17, in this space, I described what I considered to be the so-called “big and little” things of public life in T&T.

Among the several phenomena mentioned, when referencing the “little” things, was the absurd prevalence of potholes and disfigured roadways – both major and minor – all over the country.

I described the “beauty” of a hole near T&TEC along the Eastern Main Road in Curepe and jokingly noted its proximity to a tyre shop and three places of worship.

Four days later, a male pedestrian died when a car, presumed to have swerved to avoid that very pothole, struck him, narrowly missed a nearby metal bridge, and landed in the river some seven or eight metres below.

The last time I checked, the “complex” pothole - comprising a jagged, narrow horizontal strip and an adjoining axle-breaking crater was still there.

Nobody appears to have made a big, public fuss over what happened. The victim was described in news reporting as being “homeless,” and since the occupants of the car appeared to have received non-life-threatening injuries, there has been little follow-up – at least none that I have seen.

Both T&TEC and the tyre shop are back in action, road users who know the spot do a quick left and sharp right to escape; while others unfamiliar with the area painfully deal with damaged rims, tyres, and suspension systems.

The point here is that, in this instance, the penalty paid for what is at least state neglect was someone’s death. Speeding has not (yet) been proven - which would have, at minimum, introduced a notion of contributory negligence. Even so, should the penalty for speeding be someone’s death, if not yours?

The fact is that paying with one’s life has become, far too routinely, a grim feature of existence in a society that loudly proclaims the sanctity and preciousness of life – at least rhetorically.

An opinion poll would most likely show, for instance, that most of us approve of the continued presence of the death penalty on the statute books and that many would prefer to just kill “them” all … violently. This is especially so during this violent period when revenge is so frequently inter-changeable with a notion of “justice.”

It does not matter that shortcomings in the areas of policing, prosecutions, and prompt judicial action persist, and the potential for loss of innocent life - an accused in this instance - exists.

People here, by and large, believe that if you are adjudged to have taken someone’s life you should die. But even that is not the end of it.

For, simultaneously - and judging from public commentary on recent legislation introduced and passed - a penalty of death is also desirable even when all juridical and humane pre-requisites have not been satisfied.

For example, pair the eager passage of (largely misconstrued) “stand your ground” legislation with an expanded, voracious appetite for more readily available firearms and see what I mean.

Whatever the requirements of proportionality, the potential for violent escalation, and the absence of safeguards against deadly outcomes, there is a recognisable thirst for both tried and untried criminal blood. Intruders, you see, need to be killed.

It’s approximately the same mindset when it comes to people, including our own, in pirogues out at sea unilaterally declared to be engaged in criminal activity. Guilty or not, a penalty of death appears to be quite acceptable.

In such instances, insisting on any semblance of due process is certainly not a mere symptom of uninformed, partisan haste or irrational “angst.” In fact, a predisposition to question and to condemn such actions may well be a rare redeeming quality of the current period.

Meanwhile, from the same sacred platforms from which such angst is being noted there has been scarce mention of the fact that the penalty for being a baby or young child in Gaza has, for the past two years, been death by violence – all 21,000 of them (including 1,000 babies under the age of 1).

Okay, there is some disagreement over the numbers. So, let’s say, hypothetically, a single baby has been murdered (and not the 1,000 as claimed) without remorseful mention … even as we honour the birth of another, where does that leave us?

Could it be that a penalty of death is not as undesirable as we so often claim? That life, once it’s not ours, is an expendable commodity. It is a sorry condition to contemplate.

Happy New Year.