A sharp political firestorm has erupted in Trinidad and Tobago after former Prime Minister Dr. Keith Rowley publicly denounced sitting Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar’s recent Independence Day addresses as overtly racist and intentionally destructive to the country’s multi-ethnic social fabric.
In a social media post published to Facebook on Saturday, Rowley did not mince words, accusing Persad-Bissessar of stoking deep-seated racial and class division across the nation and demanding she issue a immediate public apology for what he labeled “vile, racist rubbish” that undermines the country’s hard-won peace, economic progress and political stability.
Rowley argued that since Persad-Bissessar’s administration returned to power, her agenda has not been focused on building on previous policy foundations or fulfilling campaign promises of improved quality of life for all Trinidadians and Tobagonians. Instead, he characterized the prime minister as a bitter, vengeful politician who is determined to exact retribution against demographic groups she blames for her party’s 10 years out of office.
While Rowley acknowledged that policy disagreements and subpar cabinet appointments are par for the course in partisan politics, he drew a firm line at the content of Persad-Bissessar’s 2026 Independence Day messages – especially coming one year after she canceled the national 2025 Independence celebration. Rowley stressed that this controversy is far beyond the gentle political ribbing known locally as “picong” and amounts to unvarnished racism and a deliberate divide-and-conquer strategy.
At the core of Rowley’s criticism is Persad-Bissessar’s recent appeal to rural Indo-Trinidadian communities, where she reportedly urged the group to feel a separate sense of national recognition and to push back against other groups that she claimed have marginalized low-income Indians for generations. Rowley pushed back against this framing, noting that poverty and hardship have touched all ethnic groups across the country, not just one community.
“This is naked racism and the worst form of divide and rule,” Rowley wrote. “She somehow believes that she is now in a position and entitled to call out one section of the population to utilise jingoism against the rest. This is dangerous politics in any multi-racial or multi-ethnic society. History is replete with examples of this experiment which has failed on every occasion but in many has taken peaceful societies down slippery slopes from which they never recovered.”
Rowley emphasized that none of Trinidad and Tobago’s six previous heads of government, nor any of its presidents or governors-general, have ever attempted to undermine the country’s inclusive social contract in such a calculated, harmful way. For decades, he noted, the nation’s greatest strength has been the social harmony it has built across its diverse population. Now, he claimed, Persad-Bissessar is intentionally targeting that foundational unity for destruction, and the opposition will not stand by and allow this pattern of division to continue.