The po­lit­i­cal talk on the ground is that it’s time to move away from the old fash­ioned Peo­ples Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress (UNC) brand of pol­i­tics. PNM/UNC, two sets of old time, small mind­ed cor­rupt racists and back stab­bers.

They are of­fer­ing the same cor­rupt lead­er­ship and blah, blah, blah! If the chaos and may­hem un­leashed on ob­vi­ous­ly pre-med­i­tat­ed hotspot lo­ca­tions of Port-of-Spain and en­vi­rons is all the present youth lead­ers have on of­fer, leave me with the old po­lit­i­cal pro­tag­o­nists. I can­not en­vis­age out of con­trol youth, rac­ing through the streets set­ting fires and burn­ing trash, as be­ing ca­pa­ble of pro­pelling T&T in­to the First World.

Throw your mind back to oth­er T&T young peo­ple in 1970. The Black Pow­er ris­ing of 1970 was led by Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies trained stu­dents. Ged­des Granger (Makan­dal Daa­ga) leader of the Na­tion­al Joint Ac­tion com­mit­tee, (NJAC) led a Civ­il Rights type move­ment which was suc­cess­ful at ac­quir­ing ad­vanced so­cial ac­cep­tance for both Afro and In­do cit­i­zens.

What was on show on June 30, did not in­spire pa­tri­ot­ic thoughts. It smacked of self­ish self serv­ing and of an al­leged de­lib­er­ate at­tempt at desta­bil­is­ing T&T.

There will be no re­play of the to­tal­ly ru­inous dan­ger­ous 1990 sce­nario. To­day in 2020, the nu­mer­ous Third Par­ty po­lit­i­cal lead­ers are not al­leged­ly tru­ly al­tru­is­tic.

Al­le­ga­tions of pass­ing mon­ey to de­prived youth to cause may­hem is ac­tu­al­ly un­fair to them and deeply scary to a con­cerned pub­lic.

So, what do we do?

At this present point in time there are not enough qual­i­fied youth to con­vinc­ing­ly take over lead­er­ship of T&T with­out de­stroy­ing all so­ci­etal progress made in the last 60 years.

Po­lit­i­cal cra­paud says to the youth, for­get the burn­ing tyres, ed­u­cate your sup­port base and come again in 2025.

Lynette Joseph