By Ken Ali
EMBACADERE, a grassroots community in San Fernando West, refused to show up for candidate Faris Al Rawi in the 2025 general election, deserting the PNM for the first time in decades.
The Trainline, a working class district in the Marabella West local government constituency, abandoned the PNM in the 2023 election.
The adjoining Marabella South/Vistabella also fell.
Al Rawi duly lost the Sando West seat, after two successive wins, 10 years as a high-profile government minister, and a number of political pals holding State contracts.
The defeat is even crushing when you consider that Al Rawi’s likable mother Diane Seukeran is a former Sando West MP and the family has generations-deep roots in the southern city.
For several years, many San Fernandians had summed up Al Rawi as a flagbearer of a tiny elite and symbol of Trinidad and Tobago’s huge economic divide.
Close family connections pocketed more than $20 million in annual rentals to the State, 8.5 per cent of taxpayers’ annual bill.
Al Rawi’s 58 Cabinet recusals meant that relatives were in line for major State business.
All the while, the wealth gap was widening, as a result of joblessness, cost of living, and wage stagnation.
Many of his constituents struggled to put food on the table while their elected representative stayed aloof of the working poor.
He was Attorney General when the government curiously withdrew litigation against the Petrotrin top brass that had proceeded with the ill-fated $3.2 billion World-Gas-To-Liquids (WGTL) project.
The economic and social fallout of the November 2018 Petrotrin shutdown is immeasurable.
More than 10,000 direct and indirect workers were thrown on the breadline, hundreds of small businesses crashed, and petrochemical professionals fled to other energy capitals.
Al Rawi’s track record as AG includes several major and costly legal defeats and legislative failures.
His demotion in March 2022 was long overdue.
Yet, the PNM kept faith with the flashy but futile politician, with Dr. Keith Rowley ridiculing critics of his Cabinet recusals.
And now, the weakling Pennelope Beckles-Robinson is asserting that “I will not be bullied,” suggesting that she has to think through the matter of sacking Al Rawi as a senator.
A year ago, when the Opposition Leader named the defeated and disputed Al Rawi to the Upper House, I wrote that that was “her first mistake.”
Ms. Beckles-Robinson clearly hasn’t gotten the people’s memo, a further glaring indication of her gross lack of leadership skills.
Or maybe she simply can’t touch this emblem of the powerful deep-pocket elite.
