PNM’S WAKANDA POLITICS

THE Government recently honoured Dominique Thorne, a star of the movie “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” at a function funded by a taxpayer-owned agency.

The tab was picked by National Entrepreneurship Development Company (NEDCO), which reports to Foster Cummings’ Ministry of Youth Development and National Service.

The 26-year-old Ms. Thorne, whose parents are from Trinidad and Tobago, was given the inaugural Diaspora Award.

Wakanda is a mythical country associated with great spiritual power.

The Ministry is a key agent currently being used by the Government of Dr. Keith Rowley to win electoral support.

At least a dozen programmes are being directly funded by the Ministry, which also oversees State enterprises, all of which provide grants and loans to promote youth entrepreneurship.

Cummings, who is General Secretary of the People’s National Movement (PNM), is a vital force of the PNM in urban communities, especially in marginal electoral constituencies.

The Government took the strategic decision to utilise Cummings and the Ministry to work among youths amid fears that the PNM does not hold sway with first-time voters and other young people.

Cummings has big money under his belt.

His ministry is being assigned $48 million over two years to train and mentor young business people, with grants of $20,000 each.

Some 225 such grants have already been approved.

The funds are in addition to NEDCO’s Business Accelerator and other funding schemes.

The Ministry, which operates with little national spotlight, was allocated $392 million for the fiscal year which ends within the next few weeks.

Two youth-oriented centres are being financed to the total value of $20 million, while $15 million is going to apprenticeship programmes, $7.72 for a new Junior Achievement scheme, and $3.75 million for an “enhancement empowerment” plan.

Cummings, who speaks of “wealth generation,” is a primary driving force to seek to woo Gen Z, born between 1997 and 2012, and Millennials, born between 1981 and 1996.

The PNM’s polling and the evidence at public meetings and other sessions show the ruling party does not have favour with such voters.

Cummings, 51, a founding member of the balisier-waving Heliconia Foundation, will also influence the PNM’s selection of general election candidates, as a member of the screening committee, and its electoral strategies.

He was given high billing at a party meeting last week at La Horquetta, where he spoke at length of his ministry’s various initiatives and threw barbs at the political opposition.

He also detailed a programme of construction of youth development centres.

But while he spoke, the “mature audience” was “talking among themselves,” Newsday newspaper reported, an indication that the meeting did not attract attentive youths.

There is speculation that the Ministry will get a significant budgetary allocation to launch further measures which could have the effect of boosting PNM’s electoral support.

Cummings is the incumbent Member of Parliament for La Horquetta-Talparo, where several infrastructural projects are in various stages of construction.

 He is expected to be a frontline PNM general election campaigner.