Kamla – slide to irrelevance
One Caribbean Nation.
Kamla – slide to irrelevance
Kamla – slide
to irrelevance
 |
| Professor Tennyson Joseph |
Kamla – slide to irrelevance
CARIBBEAN PEOPLE are not often afforded
the privilege of witnessing the inevitable
slide towards irrelevance, in slow motion,
of a key regional figure. Thus, when
it occurs, it should be grasped as a
precious teaching moment.
The “independence” day speech by
Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago
Kamla Persad-Bissessar as well as her
public interventions in the preceding
months, has presented such a moment.
Political leadership, by its very
definition, implies greater levels of
intellectual sophistication and
articulation than that of the ordinary
citizen. Ordinary citizens may be
forgiven for “talking foolishness” but the
political leaders cannot.
If Persad-Bissessar hoped that her
“I’m cool with colonialism” independence
speech would have shock value, she failed miserably.
No one was surprised. Since Donald Trump’s election
the world has accepted the intellectual decay of
political leaders as normal. His open racism, his
description of the South, his crude vocabulary and his lack of humanism are no longer newsworthy.
Political leaders saying the " wrong thing" just to prove that one can do it now is the flavour of the month. Thus , Kamla Persad-Bissessar's insistence to black-majority Trinidadians that they should be grateful for colonialism, was improper. No one took her seriously.
Best Chance
Therein lies her descent into
irrelevance. Just as we are unmoved
by the ramblings of our octogenarian
grandparents in their last days,
then similarly is Persad-Bissessar’s
politics on its death bed. In her
desperation, she decided that
her best chance for achieving
political relevance was to sound
exactly like the region’s powerful oppressors. She
assumed that by attacking socialist Cuba and
Venezuela, she would get “special treatment” by
the United States. It is political naivety
masquerading as hubris.
Had Persad-Bissessar demonstrated historical
knowledge she would have known better. The US
itself has admitted that while being its enemy may
be dangerous, being its friend is always fatal. Ask
Canada. Or better still, ask Persad-Bissessar who is
the US more interested in following her treatment
of Maduro: Trinidad or Venezuela?
While in the present Trumpian phase being anti
black and anti-South may appear hegemonic, events
in the Middle East portend a spectacular collapse of
US global power. It is ironic that it is to this
declining US power that Persad-Bissessar has
hitched her wagon.
However, this anti-blackness was always
unsustainable and is being challenged everywhere.
It must fall. So will those like Persad-Bissessar
who were blinded by assumptions of Trumpism’s
permanence, and who, like others inside the US
MAGA movement, could not help but be sneering,
and obnoxious, towards the despised, poor, black
populations. They will soon occupy their places in the
dustbin of history.
Tennyson Joseph is associate professor of political
science at North Carolina Central University.
Email tjoe2008@live.com
Nation Newspaper Barbados, Thursday , September 17th., 2026
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