Reflections on the Basdeo Panday Legacy: Duff Mitchell’s Virtual Sit Down With Rafique Shah

Reading Time 10 mins

January 24, 2024

Mr. Rafique Shah

On this day, a few days after the final rights ceremonies for Trinidad and Tobago’s beloved ex-Prime Minister Basdeo Panday, I got to talk with Mr. Rafique Shah. From the commencement of the interview, I knew it would be candid when I asked him, “What are your reflections on the sojourn of Basdeo Panday in the life of the people of Trinidad and Tobago?”. In a soft-spoken voice, Shah replied, “When I heard that Panday died, I decided to cut all critical statements of that because I have written extensively on it.” Shah continued to elaborate, “I have made certain allegations that he has never been able to respond to legally or otherwise. Those go into the corruption case he and others won in 2006. That was part of the Piarco Airport scandal when he was the Prime Minister, and several of his aids, along with other cabinet ministers, were investigated. The state found sufficient evidence to arrest and charge them on corruption-related charges. It reached the Point where, in this instance, the magistrate, McNichols, found several of them guilty besides Panday. He did not get bail.’

But it seemed that he decided that he would try to use this to his advantage, and he went ahead and started his imprisonment, Whereas clearly, he didn’t think that he would stay there for any length of time. So, his people came within weeks, took legal action, and got him bail, and he was out. But he did stay in jail for about a month or more. Panday, as I started saying, he (Panday) was one of the frauds… fraud may be too strong of a word to use. Still, I am looking for a word that is close to that, who have palmed themselves off on the masses as saviors of their future, re-writing their past and freeing them from discrimination.’

And getting more in his case because he became President of the sugar workers union in 1974… I think it was 74 or 75 the increase year, a 100% wage increase. And I think [Eric] Williams gave him 114% percent or 140% increase. This was a big thing because this man had just entered the union for two years, winning a massive boost for the sugar workers. Nobody remembers that before Panday came, I had mounted a public platform and worked up a storm before Panday got there. He was mainly in the factories. He was in the field. He represented the steelworkers. But he was more a factory man, so he was in St. Madeline and had those workers’ support. We had to deal with cane farmers from a distance- Mt Diablo- as far as the people from the Pointe Fortin area quite as far as Point, but not far from it, running up to the North to Orange Grove and going up to the East not quite to the swamp area, but well into the East.’

We had called for one cent a pound for the government to pay the farmers one cent for every pound of sugar they bought from the farmers, and that, in effect, was to take the farmers from $12.00 a ton to $22… that’s a big increase. Two thousand two hundred forty pounds was a ton. Eric gave it to us; he gave us a 140% increase. He took it up to $25.00 as if he said, you all want to fight me; I will give the cane farmers $25.00 a ton. Well, we were happy because we had fought the struggle, led the battle for it, and matters not what he hoped to get. He was trying to paint us out of the picture, so we were happy! Added to that, I was amazed at this thing because it showed how much these people were suffering; these people held Hindu prayers and Muslim prayers because they were mainly Hindu and Muslim.’

‘There were Afro cane farmers but not many. They were in the minority, mainly in Moruga and Bono Venture. You had areas in Moruga where the Merikins [lived] (They were formally enslaved African Americans settled in the 1st to 6th Company Villages with their descendants up to this day). So, you did have a fair number of Afro-Trinidadian cane farmers. But hey were nowhere near the Indians. And these people went and invited us, me and Leonard. Because we did not have a salary, we were working this thing virtually for free.’

Meanwhile, when Panday took over leadership, he took over a union that was up and functioning. We were able to get that massive sum for the farmers, and Panday was able to get his piggyback benefit for the workers. But Panday never came out in the open and said what I knew and what he knew. There was a spike in raw sugar price that happened to trigger that jump in revenue, a steep jump in sugar revenue, that leveled out after and went back almost to the level it was before the money was paid, so the government ended up having to subsidize sugar and that led to its death, the death of sugar. Ultimately, he was not too keen to interact with the cane farmers and the sugar workers because, as far as he was concerned, he had already used them for what he wanted to do: get into the corridors of Power.

That is how the ULS came to be born in 1973, 1974, when he was leading the sugar workers’ struggle, and I was using the cane farmers, and he asked for a meeting, and all the meetings were about politics. I had no intention of getting involved in politics, but Panday seemed to have his goal of getting into politics. Even though he was justified, he would say: ‘Without politics and control of power, you can’t do anything for your people, and he is correct.’ But he was obsessed with Power, and I was not. I thought that was a damned distraction from the people of the sugar industry and the country as a whole.

So we came together and had these affairs, for want of a better word, with George Weeks remaining as the stabilizing factor in this effort to get me not to pull out, which I did on several occasions between 73 and 76 when we had the party and went on to win ten seats. After we got the ten seats, I pulled out upon that infamous crossover, and he engineered that, too. Many people blamed me for that because what they were hearing was what he said in public: ‘Rafique Shah wanted Power. And you know that was the furthest thing in my mind.’

And you take your blows, you answer them whenever you get an opportunity, but at the end of the story, I came out of it and left him there. Now, there is just one thing I wanted to add that may not have been carried in the daily papers. But what I am saying is you will have to look up interviews I did or articles that I may have written that will contain that battle between us kept on and off over several years, how I feared in, and why I moved out of it and left it to him to do what he needed to do to get Power!

What do you think of [Panday’s] style concerning running the party?

These parties, whether it is the PNM or ULC or DLP before UNC, they tend, if you scrutinize them in all they say and do and act, the way they are managed and operate, they have democracy, you going to vote to elect leaders of the party, vice president, vice leaders, they even have women leaders, the women’s arms, vice leaders and so on… they even form a general Council more like how they set up. That is what [Eric] Williams set up in 1956 when he came in to repair the parties; he thought he did that, but let me rephrase that because he could stabilize it. But it is the leader’s dictatorship and not the people’s Power. The leader held all the tasks, and if you fell out with the leader, no matter who you were, your days were as what happened to ANR Robinson.

He was kicked out of the party, which lasted as long as 1970, but others went before him. Others were making some statement somewhere giving Eric [Williams] a little trouble on whatever he was doing, and you had to admire Williams for doing this thing like a fiddle. He was playing them like a fiddle. And Panday was one of them. When the break came in UNF in 1977, he realized we were the minority; when the party split, we had ten seats. I had six first, and he had four, so he was out of the seat, and then he came and got effective and went back to that faction. And so he returned as leader of the opposition, that is, from 1997 to 1978, and once I walked out of that, I vowed I wanted to resign; I offered to resign from my leadership of our faction of the ULS and leave it to the party to go wherever it may be going, and I would step out of politics because I never had an interest in the electoral politics.

There are problems with these things; when the first outburst occurred, we had a cuss-out and the usual thing… Resignations and this one gone that way, and this one cussing Shah and the next one cussing Panday, and by the time that settled down, we weren’t talking with each other. So thought, three, four of them, that is Nasam, Panday and I can’t remember the other two now; the records will have it. They stayed, and he had four, and I had six. I stayed there, and then I was moved back to four and went into opposition and out of the opposition leaders today, I tendered my resignation saying that I was no longer to lead this party because I had brought some failure, I don’t know if that was the word I used then.

He said I was the biggest failure in the Caribbean. He said I was the only man who tried to overthrow the government and the opposition and failed in both. He was very wicked and sharp, and that was an advantage he had over many of us because he was a trained actor. He used to put on some cries and things on stage and had the people believing him. He was good. (he was a Shakespearean Man; terrific good). He kept them to support him and put people from the union who could manage that element in the party. He saw them as necessary but not absolute, and he could go ahead and woo actual real money people, which he did successfully towards the end of his career, which led to the corruption charges. Because in the sale of the CLECO empire, which had grown to be quite extensive, and not quite big, extremely big. They were able to control Panday and the government, and that is how Carlos, I mean Carlos was a nice fellow, I don’t know if you knew Carlos John, but if you meet Carlos John, he was a nice fellow.

Carlos John, the son of Carlton John, his father, used to be an umpire, umpire John.

I may have heard that somewhere. And Duprey had worked wonders, and he has to be credited. When he became chairman of Angostura, he was able to divest into methanol and several other things. They were doing well. So well, the fellows were throwing millions of dollars in envelopes, leaving them there and forgetting things, and people would find them there. Checks valued at millions of dollars, and that is what caused the downfall of the empire. But Panday survived that too, and he was able to get, I think it was the DPP…

I think at the time, it was Henderson, who was a fair man, and Henderson found that there was insufficient evidence to take the case forward, and that is when he dropped the matter and left, that let Panday and them come out free. So, they did not get condemnation; they got donations. I don’t know… I was saying that I was accusing them, but I have no proof that they stole money. Still, they could work wonders, but as I said, a successful business matter in Trinidad matters not to whether the PNM [People’s National Movement] was in Power or the NAR [National Alliance For Reconstruction] or Panday was in Power. The corporate entities of Trinidad and Tobago were sitting pretty. They were making tons of money, so that’s my take on him. You understand, I don’t want to rehash anything now that the man is dead, I have had my say, I stand by what I wrote, and what I said and any quote you see I made. If I write it and you see my name under it, you quote it in full.

What might have been Panday’s outlook on the Caribbean leadership?

I don’t know; I must confess I know nothing about that side of him. I think he would have played it as a case for him, anywhere he could position himself and gain his peer power, and I am not saying that the small man complex is working. I am a short man, too, so I am not saying that complex is coming here. He would do anything to keep his image. You may have seen from these clips he would say things like and would repeat things a thousand times in meetings, and people would come up in an uproar every time: “When you see me and a lion fighting, feel sorry for the lion,” and the crowd would go off. And he would say it from year to year, and they would laugh at it.

In a nutshell, what would you say is his legacy?

He kept the political hustler in a position of permanency and made political hustlers acceptable to Caribbean Politics.

Duff Mitchell, recently recognized as a Cultural Ambassador by J’ouvert City International, Inc., is Vice Chairman of The Trinidad & Tobago Folk Arts Institute.