OBAMA, OBIKA AND THE WEALTH GAP

FORMER United States President Barack Obama has told journalist Christiane Amanpour that “economic inequality” is a threat to democracy.

Obama protested the “concentration of wealth,” in reference to the fact that the tip-top one per cent makes 90 times more than the bottom 20 per cent.

The US income divide has never been as wide at it is today.

Social and economic inequalities “would only make it harder” to sustain democracy, Obama said.

The ex-world leader should take a trip to Trinidad and Tobago, although in doing so he should carefully protect himself from rampaging gangsters.

He would find that the rich is getting richer, the middle class is disappearing, the poor is scraping a living, and no one – not even the ailing labour “movement” – is talking about it.

Our Central Bank says that poverty is at 20 per cent, of which two per cent do not even have a dollar to their name.

But other studies reveal that 30 per cent – almost one in three – lives under the poverty line.

Larger masses exist from payday to payday.

The disparity between rich and poor is expanding the economic class gap, feeding crime, leading to malnutrition and poor health, inadequate housing, and straining the justice and prison systems, a university report said.

The international body OECD says that “income inequality levels in Trinidad and Tobago have been proven to be high.”

The government shields behind the Central Statistical Office, whose figures it had damned in 2015 as being “of questionable quality.”

But the evidence of the yawning wealth gap is everywhere.

Publicly-traded corporations, including commercial banks, are recording unprecedented profits, including billion-dollar returns.

While Pan-American Health Organisation has identified T&T as being at crisis level with lifestyle diseases, the largest fast food chain has just reported a 55 per cent increased profit and is growing from its current 129 stores.

The small and medium-sized business sector – which at its peak numbered 20,000 and contributed 30 per cent of GDP – has crumbled after the Covid-19 shutdown.

In some cases, the plug was pulled by financial institutions, each of which is laughing all the way to the … well, bank.

Each bank is reporting dizzying billion-dollar profits, with one pulling in 83 per cent higher returns in its most recent fiscal year, compared to the previous period.

Non-performing loans – mainly small businesses that can’t service their debts – have gone up.

Business monopolies are cropping up – in pharmaceutical importation, for example – which gives them open road to jack up retail prices.

In all of this, there is Taharqa Obika, who, when I shared a beer with him a few weeks ago, was singing Kamla Persad-Bissessar’s praises.

Obika has awakened to the UNC’s need for urgent and widespread reform, but his relevance to T&T’s politics is his family’s deep roots in the National Joint Action Committee (NJAC).

A generation ago, NJAC, under the courageous and inspirational Makandal Daaga, challenged the Dr. Eric Williams administration on income inequality and lack of opportunities for the Black masses.

Youth unemployment was at 45 per cent and Blacks could not aspire to white-collar jobs in banking, insurance, and other premium sectors.

Williams had not delivered the transformational change he promised in 1962 when he hoisted the red-white-and-black.

Tens of thousands marched with Daaga and punched their fists into the air, demanding equity.

Today gulf between the powerful rich and struggling poor reveals that whatever the gains of Daaga’s Black Power movement have evaporated.

Professor Selwyn Cudjoe recently groused that Blacks in T&T are “sinking lower and lower.”

Cudjoe wrote: “Many PNM members are concerned about the few Black members in the Cabinet and the inconsequential portfolios they hold.

“They are concerned about how the party treats its Black members, the poverty among Black people, and the deteriorating conditions in which we live.”

While post-slavery societies are advancing the case for reparations, T&T has disbanded its committee, and ex-chairman Aiyegoro Ome has complained that “the current African elite and their associates in the PNM seem to have an inherent contempt for African issues.”

Ideally, Ome should have groused about the contempt for the working masses, and the refusal to introduce measures to tame exploitative banks, bolster small businesses, aid farmers, boost the minimum wage, and generally lift the small man.

Obika – a dyed-in-the-wool advocate of NJAC’s Black nationalism – has embraced the historic foe.

Obama, meanwhile, reminds us that income inequality is “a defining challenge” of our times.