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Vox Pop­uli, Vox Dei. The peo­ple have spo­ken, and as the say­ing goes, the voice of the peo­ple is the voice of God. Now, you all know I am not a po­lit­i­cal an­a­lyst, and I have no in­ten­tion of try­ing to be­come one. Still, I am a true pa­tri­ot, a son of the soil, Tri­ni to the bone, and hav­ing rep­re­sent­ed the coun­try at crick­et, as far as I am con­cerned, no­body from out­side can “bad mouth” Trinidad & To­ba­go. It’s like fam­i­ly—don’t speak ill of my fam­i­ly. I can do that, but not an out­sider. This in­tro is be­cause I will at­tempt, in my lay­man’s words, to come to terms with what hap­pened on the night of Mon­day, April 28, 2025.

First­ly, con­grat­u­la­tions to Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar and her Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress (UNC) stal­warts; they ran a cam­paign that ap­peared to be fo­cused on is­sues that many con­stant­ly spoke about—crime, in­fla­tion, and for­eign ex­change short­ages, to name a few—and the la­dy her­self showed the kind of bel­ly I wish more West In­dies bats­men could show. She was writ­ten off po­lit­i­cal­ly not once (in 2015) but twice (again in 2020), but she found a lev­el of re­silience I am not sure she knew she even had. Her op­po­nents let fly a bar­rage of bounc­ers in­tim­i­dat­ing her, hu­mil­i­at­ing her stance, so that she ac­cu­mu­lat­ed more ducks than cen­turies with her fail­ures and all the mis­takes she made with her shot se­lec­tion; how­ev­er, the worst was to come as she was seem­ing­ly viewed as too old to stand up and take her right­ful place at the wick­et.

She proved them all wrong as her shot se­lec­tion was spot on, and she dealt with the bounc­ers. When she had to leave alone, she did it with ef­fi­cien­cy even more styl­ish than Court­ney Walsh, and more than ever, she made one and all re­alise that age is just a num­ber, and once you are per­form­ing, the se­lec­tors can­not re­tire you un­til you are ready to re­tire. I met the prime min­is­ter many years ago when she was this coun­try’s first fe­male at­tor­ney gen­er­al and a few times when she was this coun­try’s first fe­male prime min­is­ter, but to be hon­est, the on­ly thing I know of her is what I see on tele­vi­sion. Still, her enor­mous strength, courage, and re­silience have to be ad­mired and should serve as an in­spi­ra­tion for our young peo­ple.