The Cruelest Trick the PNM Ever Played Was on Its Own Strongholds
For more than half a century, Trinidad and Tobago has lived under a political arrangement that’s as reliable as it is corrosive: the PNM can count on certain communities, election after election and in return those same communities too often remain stuck with poor services, low opportunity, and a state that shows up mostly when it wants votes or wants order.
Look carefully at the map of “safe” PNM territory and then look at the lived reality in too many of those places. Beetham. Sea Lots. Laventille. Pockets of Diego Martin. La Brea. Communities that have carried the party on their backs for decades are still battling basics people elsewhere take for granted: stable infrastructure, consistent development, real jobs that aren’t a temporary “make-work” program, and public services that don’t feel like a favour.
That’s not accidental. That’s what happens when a party stops fearing its base.
Safe seats breed contempt. And contempt breeds neglect.
The PNM’s defenders will say poverty is complicated, and that’s true. But complexity is not an excuse when the same story repeats itself across generations: loyalty is banked, while development is postponed. A government that truly respects its strongholds doesn’t leave them as permanent symbols of “struggle” to be paraded at election time. It invests until they become symbols of mobility.
And if you want to understand how we got here, you can’t avoid the Eric Williams era, the era that created the political culture we’re still living inside.
Williams was brilliant, yes. He also governed like a man who believed control was stability, and stability mattered more than people feeling powerful in their own lives. When social unrest rose, the state’s first instinct was not to share power, but to contain it. The 1970 Black Power period still sits in the national memory as a warning: push too hard, and the machinery of the state will remind you who holds the baton.
Even more uncomfortable is the economic structure that hardened over time: a small commercial elite with outsized influence, protected networks, and an economy where access, access to opportunity, to credit, to contracts, to “insider” doors, often mattered as much as talent or labour. Ordinary citizens watched an economy grow, watched money move, and still felt locked outside of it as the Syrian and Lebanese immigrants were given opportunities. Today they control the economy.
That is the central indictment: not that Trinidad and Tobago failed to produce wealth, but that it failed, again and again, to spread power.
And here’s the part too many people tiptoe around: when a party is confident that a constituency will vote for it no matter what, it has less incentive to deliver and every incentive to manage. Manage expectations. Manage anger. Manage dependency. Keep communities just close enough to survive, but not strong enough to become politically unpredictable.
That is what political captivity looks like. It isn’t chains. It’s the quiet message: Where else you going?
So yes, criticize other parties. Hold everyone accountable. But stop pretending the PNM’s relationship with its most loyal communities is healthy. It isn’t. It’s transactional, and the transaction has been lopsided for far too long.
Rowley did not invent this. He inherited a political culture built on the logic of safe seats, loyal blocs, and selective urgency. When governments change faces but keep the same habits, when they can win without transforming the lives of the people who love them most, that isn’t just politics. That’s a moral failure.
The point isn’t to shame anyone for how they vote. The point is to demand that loyalty finally be treated as something precious,not something exploitable as the africans were.
Because a constituency that votes faithfully and lives poorly is not a success story.It’s a warning.
The PNM saw it in the Polls of the last election.
Sarge.