Read the column: Playing the race card
What he lacked in quality, he made up for in quantity, for his discourse reflected a level of myopic-ism expected in one less initiated by than he is.
Cudjoe missed the point not because of a lack of erudition but rather because he chose a standpoint which provided him with a line of sight to view only what he wanted to view.
The militancy one is experiencing within the labour movement did not emerge overnight.
The wanton wastage by a cavalier government, the arrogance of elected officers, the neglect of the national community and the abandonment of the weak in our society were all hallmarks of a rogue government which forced the current President to warn this country of becoming a failed state.
In spite of the demise of the last PNM government and the social scourge which visited our land, the militancy which we are now experiencing was never a context which sought to right the wrongs.
The voice of dissent was silenced. Public officers were battered into retreat by systemic rearrangements such as the establishment of different agencies, eg SAUTT and the T&T Revenue Authority, which began to emerge across the landscape.
But few dared to challenge the patriarchy with any serious attempt at being austere. Even the dissenting voice within the governance was stripped of power, relegated to backbench status and yet, in spite of the humiliation, when it came to vote they all towed the line... ”the Prime Minister has spoken.”
That is the question which Cudjoe must answer before attempting any deconstruction within the discourse.
He ventures into the world of the villain valorising again the institution of SAUTT which finds no basis for its existence within the Constitution of Trinidad and Tobago.
Cudjoe must provide the basis upon which he becomes so triumphal in his validation of money spent on an illegal institution while at the same time ignoring the impact this preferential treatment had on the morale of the rest of the Police Service.
How can he so glibly applaud the reward offered to this preferred group without the empirical evidence to support their achievement?
This is function of the patriarchy and if Cudjoe cannot recognise that it is his gender blindness that has allowed him to applaud Patrick Manning’s wrongs while at the same time jeer at the “mistakes” of the Kamla Persad-Bissessar government, then it is the fulfilment of such a prophetic utterance that “whom the God’s wish to destroy they first send mad.”
There is nothing in the text for which I need to apologise. There is no mischaracterisation as it relates to the police. The pain Dr Cudjoe feels has nothing to do with Jack Warner per se.
Instead it is the rambling of depressed feelings of being governed by a woman and yes an East Indian woman, which is being projected and directed towards me.
As the youth of the nation would say, professor, “yuh baad.”
Jack Warner | Minister of Works and Transport
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