By Wayne Kublalsingh – Oct 9, 2026
Having scuttled the Dragon gas field, jeopardized our energy relations with Venezuela, and found itself in growing fiscal difficulties arising from gas income shortfalls, the government is busying the people’s minds by making laws. It is looking to amend laws to create the semblance of action — laws which fix nothing, aggravate everything, and meet not with their hotly touted objectives. It costs nothing to bring bills to Parliament and argue law.
Going to Parliament to make or amend laws begets big coverage. The media is always outside the Red House throwing questions, inside the chambers covering them, and headlining the latest legal ‘action’. It gives the impression that this is a law-minded administration out to reform, improve, create an orderly society — a law-and-order government. Ah, this lawless society, let’s do an SOE. Let’s do a PDO. A SOB. And let’s do an attack on youth drunkenness. And let’s do local government reform. And the population, including the media and the opposition, is carried along in the tide of manufactured jhanjhat — confusion.
Bills after bills are brought to Parliament with accusatory passion, finger-pointing at the guilty citizenry. We are a lawless dump! If you complain you are accused of being one with the criminals. Legitimate parliamentary opposition is denounced as PNM shielding criminal friends and family. Independent senators are “satanic” or “scumbags.” The criminalization of society is coming from inside Parliament.
And don’t talk about you Syrians. Misbehave and we have a cell at Teteron waiting for you. Take a PDO, Mr Hadeed, you and your wife. And you Madame Star. You have a case to answer. And you “greedy” druglords in Westmoorings and Federation Park. A cell at Teteron waiting for you too. And we have a big Chinese-linked mafia in TT too. These big fish, Syrians, Caucasians, Chinese are causing us hell. These are the real one-percent gangs. However, you could bet your bottom dollar that whenever this current administration demits office, not a single strawman druglord of whatever ethnic background would be charged and convicted.
The government is like the teacher who spends her weekend at the CPL, flag-waving, shouting, sipping from a cup, and returns to class on Monday morning having failed to mark her students’ essays, and starts shouting — reading the riot act to her class. Covering up her sins of indiscipline and slackness. And why didn’t you bring your textbook? Or comb your hair?
This government’s legislative agenda in Parliament will always be stacked. This PM will always use her photo ops and soundbites to throw helter-skelter Trump-like barbs, to busy the minds of the population with the excitement of legal and political nothings and irrelevancies. That is because it lacks the vision or capital for doing serious developmental work. Having scuttled our prospective energy fortunes, all it can realistically accomplish is its monthly scrape-up of funds to pay civil servants, grants and pensions, bond interest, and services, transfers, subventions.
The PM uses commonplace buzzwords to justify her egregious actions. Her support for the US attack against Venezuela, her sale of our national and energy sovereignty to Trump, was done in the name of ‘national security’. The PM’s Local Government Reform Bill (2026) has been touted as a crackdown on inefficiency, waste, and poor delivery of services. “These changes are about people, not politics. People have been suffering for too long.” She had promised not one cent to achieve this. Another cent-less legal gambit. We will have the same people, mostly government hacks, delivering the same services. No genuine, concerted attempt at wider local public participation. (See ‘A Promise To Fight, Manifesto 2025-2040’, Constituency Government, p.11, Wayne Kublalsingh).
The PM and her key parliamentary colleagues are officers of the court. Attorneys. Parliament, the seat of lawmaking, is their element. They know how to quip and quibble over legal points and niceties. Their speeches in Parliament are protected by law. They have little conception of building an economy, diversification, social and educational reconstruction. They know how to spend, rent, issue contracts for local contractors and global neo-liberal investors — the kind who are gifted our financial, economic, social, and ecological assets in exchange for a few jobs and dollars for our treasury. They do what they are clever at: using legal whip to whip up distraction, oppression, the impression of action.
The PNM is no match for this government of legal autocrats. The opposition has failed to effectively challenge the PM’s diplomatic fiasco with CARICOM and Venezuela, or the government’s deployment of law to impugn and scapegoat minority ethnic groups, or the government’s victimization of innocents with PDOs and SOEs. The PNM has failed to defend CEPEP, the growing impoverished and jobless. It is content to wait, presumably until 2030, and throw pebbles, petty remonstrances, whilst Lankini burns the city.
Nor do we see resistance from Ministers John Jeremie, Attorney General; Roger Alexander, Minister of Homeland Security; Sean Sobers, Foreign Affairs Minister; and Jearlean John, Minister of Works. These constitute the PM’s hand-chosen bodyguard unit — defenders of the realm.
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The government’s parliamentary bench constitutes a confederacy of legal autocrats, inflicting rule BY law rather than the rule OF law. Everyone is lawless except itself. It uses Parliament and the legal apparatus as substitutes for progress, reform, development. Clip after clip of law is being emptied against the population — mostly trite, oppressive, or irrelevant law which falls scandalously opposed to their much-touted objectives.
WK/OT
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