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 ...

ByPachamama The entire leadership of West Indies cricket must be fired, immediately! When we say the leadership we are not speaking about Darren Sammy alone. We include the members of all the Boards, executive management, selectors and team management. Nowhere in Christendom has any set of managers been so inept, produced almost (20) years of failure and like a petty dictatorship in a banana republic, has held the people of the Caribbean ransom to their autocracy. In addition, the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) outsources capital development cost to the people of the Caribbean, has generally failed to produce a structure that could support the senior team over time, seems incapable in getting its financial affairs in order and rigidly enforces a bankrupt colonial policy of social conformity.      Darren Sammy, a St. Lucian, has for quite awhile been positioned to take the captaincy by the President of the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) another St. Lucian...

By Pachamama The recent controversy about an alleged letter presumably written by the signature of eleven (11) Democratic Labour Party (DLP) members of parliament, their unwillingness to follow through after it came to light and the failure of the Leader of the Opposition to see this as an opening to repeat his political shenanigans of 1994, indicates that the hidden hand of white corporate power and the so-called party fathers who are at work to maintain the Fruendel Stuart regime. The letter and the discussion since, suggest a mere demand for a meeting with Prime  Freundel Stuart, to discuss his leadership and was largely inspired by a recent poll, in four marginal constituencies, indicating that the DLP could lose the next general election. It was this type of request for a meeting that led to the ouster of Clyde Mascoll as opposition leader in 2007.  Its discovery and surreptitious release to the press, in our judgment, speaks volumes about the behind-the-scenes intrigues,...

The current nonsense now rupturing the Democratic Labour Party, should not surprise anyone remotely monitoring the political scene in Barbados. Ever since his becoming Prime Minister, Freundel Stuart, has been deemed uncharismatic.  Soon after  he had taken over the reins of the D.L.P, after the death of Prime Minister, David Thompson, the knives came out. The charismatic, Minister of Finance, Mr. Christopher Sinckler, has been apparently  crowned the new Errol Barrow! Mahogany Coconut, will not bore readers with the fiasco of the letter that was alleged to be signed by eleven parliamentarians, seeking a meeting with Stuart , to discuss the slippage of the ruling party. Suffice it say, that the Nation Newspaper , gave the impression , that there was some advanced plot to remove the Prime Minister. We all know that organ has a real stake in seeing the Opposition Barbados Labour Party led by former Prime Minister Owen Arthur, returned to office. We leave it to the...

OBAMA, SARKOZY, CAMERON, BUSH #1, BUSH #2, BLAIR, CLINTON and the United Nations Should BE TRIED FOR GENOCIDE, CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY, CRIMES AGAINST NATURE, and the USE OF weapons of mass destruction (WMD) – ALL WAR CRIMES .    by Pachamama Everywhere white people have gone they have left a trail of mass crimes against all the peoples of color of this world. Never before in the history of mankind have we entered an epoch where one racial group is so intent on maintaining their dominance that they are willing to develop the most powerful weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to be held by them, almost exclusively, while constructing a international network of institutions to prevent others from defending themselves using the same means. They are weapons of mass destruction which continue to kill innocent civilians for thousands of years after their initial use. Americans are not generally aware of the biological, technological and environmental war crimes committed against the in...