For the sec­ond con­sec­u­tive year, con­tro­ver­sy and un­cer­tain­ty have sur­round­ed the stag­ing of Trinidad and To­ba­go's In­de­pen­dence Day Pa­rade, rais­ing fresh con­cerns about the Gov­ern­ment's ap­proach to pub­lic con­sul­ta­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tion.

As the Gov­ern­ment moves for­ward with its po­lice post ini­tia­tive, the lat­est el­e­ment of its strat­e­gy to ad­dress Trinidad and To­ba­go's en­dur­ing crime prob­lem, im­por­tant ques­tions re­main about how the pro­gramme will op­er­ate and whether it can de­liv­er sus­tain­able re­sults.

Some of us have had the time, pa­tience, and in­ter­est to re­peat­ed­ly con­sid­er the late Mer­chant’s 1985 sug­ges­tion that the steel­pan might have at that time been “in dan­ger.”

Healthy in­dus­tri­al re­la­tions re­quire far more than rhetoric, po­lit­i­cal point-scor­ing or threats of protests. The on­go­ing dis­putes in­volv­ing the Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Work­ers’ Union (CWU) and Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Ser­vices of Trinidad and To­ba­go (TSTT), the Pub­lic Ser­vices As­so­ci­a­tion (PSA) and the Wa­ter and Sew­er­age Au­thor­i­ty (WASA), and the Sea­men and Wa­ter­front Work­ers’ Trade Union (SWW­TU) and the Port Au­thor­i­ty of Trinidad and To­ba­go (PATT) should serve as a warn­ing that the coun­try’s col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing sys­tem needs ur­gent at­ten­tion.

Fever is a symp­tom. It is not a dis­ease. Yet, there are many dis­eases which con­tain the word fever in their name. Some have half a dozen names. Malar­ia, for ex­am­ple, was called swamp, jun­gle, marsh, and in Guyana, black­wa­ter fever be­cause it can turn urine black. This was quite dif­fer­ent to black fever or dum­dum, which has noth­ing to do with MA­GA vot­ers and is bet­ter known as kala azar.

What is now owed to the peo­ple of Cari­com, whose gov­ern­ments have placed them un­der the Caribbean Court of Jus­tice (CCJ) in its orig­i­nal ju­ris­dic­tion, as well as the five coun­tries that have ful­ly em­braced the court's ap­pel­late ju­ris­dic­tion?

Or­gan­i­sa­tion­al or in­sti­tu­tion­al mem­o­ry refers to how or­gan­i­sa­tions store, re­tain and reuse da­ta, knowl­edge and ex­pe­ri­ences over time. This mem­o­ry is cod­i­fied in the rules and reg­u­la­tions, or in the sys­tems and process­es that guide every­day ac­tions. Some­times cir­cum­stances change, re­quir­ing pro­ce­dures to be rewrit­ten to ac­com­mo­date new learn­ing or tech­no­log­i­cal changes. In­tro­duc­ing the changes re­quires con­sul­ta­tion with per­sons af­fect­ed by those changes.

The coun­try has ex­pe­ri­enced earth­quakes, floods, land­slides, trop­i­cal storms and oth­er haz­ards over gen­er­a­tions, yet the ab­sence of a re­cent cat­a­stroph­ic nat­ur­al dis­as­ter can cre­ate a dan­ger­ous sense of se­cu­ri­ty. Re­cent events in neigh­bour­ing Venezuela and Colom­bia should serve as a pow­er­ful re­minder that the re­gion re­mains seis­mi­cal­ly ac­tive and that dev­as­tat­ing earth­quakes can oc­cur with lit­tle warn­ing.

Abelar­do de la Es­priel­la, a right-wing politi­cian, took of­fice as Colom­bia’s new pres­i­dent on Au­gust 7. His vic­to­ry has been de­scribed as part of a broad­er, Trump-in­flu­enced right­ward shift in Latin Amer­i­ca.

There is lit­tle doubt that chick­en re­mains this coun­try's favourite form of pro­tein and that the ap­peal of poul­try cuts across the coun­try's class, race, re­li­gious, gen­der and age dif­fer­ences.

It is not of­ten that the First Peo­ples of Trinidad and To­ba­go, the Amerindi­ans, re­ceive sus­tained na­tion­al at­ten­tion out­side of cer­e­mo­ni­al oc­ca­sions. Even then, such recog­ni­tion is of­ten fleet­ing rather than re­flec­tive of the com­mu­ni­ty's sig­nif­i­cance to the na­tion's his­to­ry and iden­ti­ty.

The vis­it of US Deputy Sec­re­tary of State Christo­pher Lan­dau has pro­duced some­thing Trinidad and To­ba­go bad­ly needs: af­fir­ma­tion that in­ter­na­tion­al in­vestors con­tin­ue to see this coun­try as a fer­tile and eco­nom­i­cal­ly at­trac­tive place in which se­ri­ous busi­ness can be done.