Dear Editor,
There is a particular kind of political audacity that mistakes performance for governance — that confuses the volume of one’s international posturing with the quality of one’s domestic stewardship. Two leaders in our Caribbean neighbourhood have, in recent months, perfected this art to a troubling degree: Trinidad and Tobago’s Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar and Guyana’s President Irfaan Ali. Both have sought to glitter on the regional stage by orbiting Washington’s current sun, burnishing their credentials by echoing the rhetoric of an administration that has little regard for small island developing states beyond what it can extract from them. And yet, while they competed for favour in Trump’s court, the houses they govern were quietly catching fire.
Persad-Bissessar’s regional tour of righteous indignation was striking in its confidence. She disparaged fellow CARICOM leaders who declined to parrot Washington’s position on Venezuela, lent her voice to labelling Cuba a state sponsor of terrorism — a designation that serves American geopolitical interests far more than Caribbean ones — and cast herself as the responsible grown-up in a room full of sovereigntists she seemed to regard as naive. The optics were those of a leader with her affairs in order, one secure enough at home to lecture her neighbours on hemispheric alignment. The reality, as Trinidad and Tobago has now been forced to confess twice in five weeks, is rather different. The country has returned to a State of Public Emergency as of March 3rd, 2026 — barely a month after the last one expired on January 31st. The National Security Council’s own briefings speak of mass shootings, escalating gang reprisals, and credible intelligence of planned attacks on police officers, prison officers, and members of the legal services. This is not a crime wave that materialized overnight. It is the harvest of neglect — of a state that had more energy for policing CARICOM’s ideological borders than securing its own streets. The warning Persad-Bissessar issued to gang members — that law-abiding citizens were “fed up” — rings hollow when it is her government’s watch that has brought the country to this pass a second time in as many months. One does not get credit for extinguishing fires one failed to prevent.
Across the water in Guyana, the emergency wears a different face but carries the same stench of leadership prioritising image over integrity. President Ali has similarly wrapped himself in the convenient warmth of Washington’s approval, positioning Guyana as the responsible, investment-friendly, diplomatically pliant partner the region should emulate. And yet the Leader of the Opposition has, through a series of documented public reports, laid bare a landscape of pervasive corruption that the state’s own investigative and oversight institutions seem constitutionally incapable of addressing — not because they lack the mandate, but because those institutions have been captured.
Systematically. Deliberately. The bodies tasked with investigating financial crimes, with auditing public accounts, with holding executive power to account, have been so thoroughly subordinated to the presidency that they function less as checks and more as ornamental fixtures. That is not governance. That is state capture — and state capture of that magnitude, one that normalises the haemorrhaging of a nation’s oil wealth before the ink is dry on the contracts, is its own kind of emergency. It simply does not require a gazette notice to declare it.
What unites these two leaders, beyond geography and ambition, is a fundamental confusion between alignment and leadership. Proximity to Trump’s orbit does not transform a Prime Minister or President into a statesman. It does not clean streets, reduce murders, or return stolen public funds. The citizens of Port of Spain who wake to gang violence are not consoled by their government’s position on Cuba. The Guyanese taxpayer whose national patrimony leaks through corrupted procurement is not enriched by their President’s warm reception in Washington. In both cases, the performance of regional relevance has substituted for the hard, unglamorous work of accountable governance.
Caribbean leaders would do well to remember that their primary audience is not in Washington or Mar-a-Lago. It sits in the communities they were elected to serve — communities that are, with increasing impatience, tallying the distance between what their leaders proclaim on the international stage and what they deliver at home. That distance, in both Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana, has become unconscionable. No amount of geopolitical theatre will close it.
Regards
Hemdutt Kumar
