T&T Political Landscape, A Critical Examination
When the PNM warns that the UNC is “targeting” constituencies with large Black populations,ZOSOS, it thinks it’s sounding an alarm. What it’s actually doing is testifying against itself.
Because if those communities are so politically “targetable”, so vulnerable, so easily destabilised, so ripe for manipulation, after more than six decades of PNM dominance in many of them, then the uncomfortable question is not what the UNC is doing. The real question is: what exactly has the PNM been doing all this time?
This isn’t a campaign slip. It’s a confession.
You don’t get to govern communities for generations and then, in election season, describe them as underdeveloped, crime-ridden, socially fragile and politically exploitable without implicating yourself. That condition, where young men are both disposable and recruitable, where public services feel like occasional charity, where opportunity is more slogan than system, doesn’t happen overnight. It is produced. It is maintained. And if it is maintained under your watch, it is your PNM legacy.
Yes, colonialism set the trap. It severed Afro-Trinidadians from Africa not just physically but psychologically, turning “African” into something to be mocked, hidden, or reduced to costume. It hollowed out cultural confidence and replaced it with a thin promise: survive, obey, and maybe the state will reward you. That kind of rupture leaves a vacuum. And vacuums don’t stay empty.
Into that vacuum stepped political loyalty.
For many Afro-Trinidadians, the PNM became more than a party. It became a vehicle for belonging, a language of pride, a shelter from contempt, a substitute for the cultural institutions that colonialism weakened and that post-independence society never fully rebuilt. And for a time, it worked. Free education expanded horizons. Healthcare improved quality of life. Energy infrastructure underwrote national development. Those gains are real, and pretending otherwise is dishonest.
But the tragedy is that the same party that helped create possibility also helped normalise stagnation. Not because it did nothing, but because it eventually did what long-ruling parties often do: it confused loyalty with entitlement, symbolism with transformation, and electoral arithmetic with moral responsibility. The relationship stopped being mutual. It became extractive.And that’s where the comparison matters, carefully, without the cheapness of racial blame.
Indo-Trinidadians, broadly speaking, retained dense cultural and religious institutions, temples, mosques, family networks, customs, schools of thought, structures that made political organisation a natural extension of community life rather than a replacement for it. That is not an accusation. It’s an observation about social architecture. One group could negotiate with parties from a position of cultural continuity. The other, too often, had to negotiate through the party because the party had become the mediator of identity and access.
So when the PNM speaks as if Black communities are its territory, areas to be “defended” from UNC “targeting”, it reveals the ugliest underside of that dependency: communities treated less like citizens and more like inherited property.
And then came the betrayal that cannot be dressed up as pragmatism.
Faced with backlash, confronted with the hard work of evidence-based policy, on crime, on education reform, on youth intervention, on accountability, the PNM folded. It flinched. It chose short-term political comfort over long-term national repair. It retreated whenever tough decisions threatened its support base, and in doing so it abandoned the very young people it claimed to champion.Results: an election loss
That is not “governance under pressure.” That is cowardice in office.
It is also how you end up with the cruelest paradox of all: a party that says it is protecting Black youth while presiding over systems that fail them, feeding them into cycles of violence, incarceration, migration, and early death, and then using their suffering as an election-season warning sign.
None of this lets the UNC off the hook. The UNC has often been content to watch Black communities burn as long as the smoke didn’t drift into its margins. Where it could have helped build cross-ethnic policy consensus around crime reduction, social investment, and youth development, it has too often opted for obstruction, point-scoring, or quiet complicity. If the PNM’s sin is fear and inaction, the UNC’s is opportunism and indifference.
So yes: the PNM failed Black communities through timidity, complacency, and the misuse of loyalty. The UNC failed Black youth through obstruction and complicity. Both parties, in different ways, have treated the lives of young Black men as expendable, either as a captive constituency to be managed or a social crisis to be exploited.
And until that is said plainly, without euphemism, without pretending that “community issues” are just bad luck, without hiding behind racial dog whistles dressed up as concern, nothing will change.
Not the crime. Not hopelessness. Not the brittle social fabric. Not the political cynicism.
Because the truth is simple, even if it is uncomfortable: if a party governs you for generations and you remain structurally vulnerable, then the party has not protected you.
It has used you.
Sarge