Day Trinidad and Tobago became big news around the world

Austin Fido

SAY WHAT you like about a state of emergency, it does wonders for a country’s global profile. Per Google Trends, the worldwide volume of web searches for “Trinidad and Tobago” effectively doubled on December 30, 2024, the day TT declared its SoE.

As for media, the story was everywhere – BBC, CNN, New York Times, Al Jazeera, China Daily, The Indian Express – in long or in short, freshly reported or recycled from the news wires. For one day at least, TT was big – one might even say extravagant – news.

It wasn’t always the most accurately reported news. Germany’s Deutsche Welle ran a report suggesting the entire state of emergency was only in place for 48 hours – something lost in translation, no doubt.

Stuart Young woke up on New Year’s Eve to find the world couldn’t quite figure out who he was: to Al Jazeera and Associated Press, he was TT’s acting Attorney General (correct – in the context in question); for France 24 and the UK Guardian, he was simply Attorney General (not so, or perhaps, not yet); DW opted for Energy Minister (true); Reuters went with Minister in the Office of the Prime Minister (also true).

To be fair to a befuddled global press, Young’s portfolio of responsibilities is so constantly variable he must also occasionally struggle to remember his job title on a given day.

For much of the world, however, the identity of Mr Young and his brother-in-press-conferences, Minister of National Security Fitzgerald Hinds, was irrelevant. Because as far as the world is concerned, this is Keith Rowley’s state of emergency.

Speaking purely for myself, a career in journalism does not mark you out as the shed’s sharpest tool. You spend a lot of time engaging with things you know nothing at all about, and it doesn’t take long to see the stuff you know nothing at all about is most of the stuff. So context clues become very important. Context clues like “Who sent me this?”

The world’s press got its SoE-in-TT briefing from the Office of the Prime Minister in TT. The world’s press concluded this was a communication from the TT Prime Minister. Most reports led with some variation on the theme of “Prime Minister Keith Rowley declares a state of emergency in Trinidad and Tobago.”

In pieces filed by the New York Post and St Vincent Times, Rowley is the only TT government official named. No word about National Security honcho Hinds or Minister of Everything Young, which is all very normal. Governments announce policies, prime ministers lead governments, the biggest policy decisions are attributed to the PM’s leadership. Hardly worth mentioning, but for the fact that when asked why Rowley was not at the SoE press conference, Minister of All the Things Young advised it was “not appropriate” for the Prime Minister to be at such an event.

To which one must say: “Pardon?”

Not possible to attend, sure. It was an emergency press conference. Young was himself standing in for an AG who wasn’t there, presumed to  be simply too far away to make it to the presser. It’s an ambitious gambit to suggest a PM’s office can send word to every corner of the world, but the PM is prevented by protocol from delivering the same message directly to his own electorate.

There are of course more serious matters in play than who went to which press conference and why.

TT’s SoE has caught the world’s attention, and not in the best way. Many foreign media outlets noted that Haiti had declared a state of emergency a week before  TT.

That is perhaps the most sobering aspect of the deluge of foreign media coverage of TT’s affairs: for many observers, the SoE puts TT in the same circumstance as Haiti, a country that hasn’t had an election since 2016 nor had an elected president since the last one was assassinated in 2021.

The extraordinary amount of time at the SoE presser devoted to delineating differences between this SoE and the one declared by the preceding government more than a decade ago suggests government and opposition are ready to embark on a vigorous game of my-SoE-is-better-than-your-SoE.

Before they start down that road, they might do well to note the world is watching.

No one outside TT cares much about how this SoE is or isn’t different from the one in 2011. The world thinks it sees another Caribbean country sliding toward anarchy. It just wants this emergency measure to work out.