Mahogany CoConut Blog

It is certainly not the intention of Mahogany Coconut to pick sides in the current and embarrassing dispute now bitterly engulfing the Alexandra School, the Barbados Secondary Teachers Union and the Principal, Mr. Jeff Broomes. Suffice it to say that no self –respecting union, defending the rights of its members, should bow to pressure, by allowing an entire staff, to work with a principal, in whom they have lost total confidence. Let’s face it, teachers in Barbados, are not known to go to such lengths, unless they are absolutely fed up with the management of the school plant. Indeed, it was shocking to witness, the Principal, a former high ranking officer and member of the Barbados Union of Teachers, engaged in publicly criticizing a member of the staff at the school’s last speech day function. He should have known that action would have caused further fractioning within the institution. He even went further and issued a challenge to those who will have questioned his criticism to...

Ever since we started in 2008, we have chosen to be frank and forthright. Four years later, we can claim to be the first Caribbean organ to identify the recession which finally arrived at the Caribbean ports of call in 2011. We were not taken seriously. After all Mahogany Coconut is not the dwelling place of opportunistic intellectuals, retired college professors, diplomats and bankers, who use their vast contacts  to end up writing columns for hefty sums. They write and then disappear into their gated communities protected by guard dogs, private security guards and expensive electronic security systems. It is not that they are bad people. Quite the contrary, they are good decent brothers and sisters, who are as trapped as the poor at the bottom of the socio- economic ladder. They also believe that we can change everything without interfering with the status quo but that is a mere pipe dream. They bought into the dream of the sixties and seventies: get an education, move up the ...

By Pachamama The recent electoral triumph of Jamaica’s Peoples National Party (PNP) of Portia Simpson-Miller represents the most recent manifestation of the inability of political elites in the Caribbean to satisfy the fundamental requirements of democracy, as an economic system. The defeat of the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) is best understood within a context of the desperation of Caribbean peoples as we seek to resolve our resource problems and this unremitting malady will not no-time-soon disappear despite the axiomatic utterances to the contrary by the obscurantist popinjays. It comes within current regional and global circumstances where all incumbent governments have or are likely to continue to be easily defeated, electorally or otherwise. Notwithstanding the temporary euphoria within the PNP political tribe, the underlying problems of poverty, lack of housing, crime, budgetary problems, graft and dependency have continued to accumulate across administrations throughout the ...