Kamla calls for ‘savagery’

Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar used Trinidad and Tobago’s 64th Independence Day to deliver a hard-edged message to her United National Congress supporters: diplomacy alone is not enough.

“Finesse and diplomacy must be backed up with steeliness and savagery when required to define the party’s membership,” she said in a social-media message addressed to the “UNC family”. She warned that the party must never be hijacked by what she called the local drug mafia or the “fake eat-a-food elite”, as she accused the PNM of having been.

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Finesse and diplomacy must be backed up with steeliness and savagery when required to define the party’s membership

Persad-Bissessar paired that combative language with an appeal for solidarity. She urged people to keep “love in our communities” and said they should not allow their hearts to become “small and bitter”. At the same time, she told supporters not to submit to anyone, declaring: “It’s either peace or total war, nothing in between.”

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A UNC leader must never allow our party to be hijacked by the local drug mafia and the fake eat-a-food elite as happened to the PNM

The prime minister linked the party’s identity to ancestors who endured poverty in lagoons, cane fields and oilfields. She recalled families surviving on salt and rice, fetching water by cart and walking long distances to government services. Their sacrifices, she said, helped later generations pursue education and claim equal citizenship.

She called on UNC members to keep learning, working and improving, and to become owners and entrepreneurs rather than settling only for wage work or state welfare. Persad-Bissessar thanked the party for giving her the honour of leading it and said she would work to ensure its members’ voices were heard.

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It’s either peace or total war, nothing in between