Young, a bad-deal bobolee

Among the Easter traditions of egg hunting, attending Holy Week celebrations, cooking fish and provisions, and kite flying in the Queen’s Park Savannah, finding a Good Friday ­bobolee is one of my favourites. It bridges creativity, ingenuity, commitment, and socio-cultural critique. Originally meant to represent ­Judas who, as the story goes, betrayed Jesus, the bobolee today symbolises the more local forms of betrayal that people and communities experience.

In this sense, while the Easter weekend is over, the bobolees remain as ­reminders of how we have and continue to be betrayed. The “Stuart Young” bobolee I spotted near Laventille Road spoke volumes. Laventille is to the PNM what the Savannah is to Carnival.



It is foundational, visible, and ritualised every election season—yet left worn down and under-invested the rest of the year. A PNM bobolee in one of the party’s vice-grip constituencies may not be new. Still, given the recently failed Dragon gas deal which Young championed to its dying death, his bobolee counterpart has more to it than its inner stuffing.

The ill-fated rise and predictable death of the Dragon gas deal is ­underscored by the fact that we have already been paying a portion of over US$1 million per year in taxes to Venezuela as part of the deal. Young admitted that payments due to Vene­zuela consisted of royalty, a special commission of 5%, surface tax, social contributions, and a confidential signing bonus. Wherever Venezuela Presi­dent Nicolas Maduro is right now, he must be smiling from ear to ear as we have been the biggest loser in the US-Venezuela sanctions.

Focusing on the Dragon gas deal, however, as the PNM has focused almost singularly, the revoked OFAC licence brings to the fore just how difficult the next four years under the Trump presidency will be for our economy when it’s only been four months since he stepped back into the White House. Former prime minister Dr Keith Rowley, under whose administration the Dragon gas deal was pursued with significantly less fervent attention to equally profitable forms of diversification, said in March 2025, “if you see us losing that OFAC licence then know that your coo coo is cooked”. So said, so done.

At the March 21 opening ceremony of the La Brea Community Centre, Young boasted, “I think one of the things I’m known for, is getting things done...

Dragon (gas deal)...

Manatee (gas deal), if it’s other things.” If Young was willing to blow his own trumpet by boasting of getting things done, the now-dead Dragon and Cocuina-Manakin gas deals are testaments that he has achieved very little as Energy Minister and would likely achieve little as elected prime minister. His meeting on April 7, which revisited the previously failed deal with the Sandals Resorts Group to extend the hotel chain in Tobago, doesn’t appear to hold much promise, especially when we consider that for this Easter season, Tobago Hotel and Tourism Association president Reginald Mac Lean predicted a bleak outlook for hoteliers, with occupancy struggling to reach 50%.

In the interim, at least, whoever becomes the next prime minister should focus on attracting locals to existing hotels before wooing international hotelier investors, especially those from the Sandals Group, as that proposed project has dragged on even longer than the Dragon gas deal and looks to suffer a similar fate. Before any more deals are pursued, we need to rethink our current diplomatic strategy. Young’s legacy of poor decision-making might be epitomised by the now-dead Dragon gas deal, but in fact his first poor decision as the appointed Prime Minister was to call the 2025 general election one day ­after being gifted the reins by Dr Rowley.

Had Young been patient enough to wait out the maximum constitutionally allowed date to call the election, he could have avoided the overlap of the dead Dragon deal with the silly season. Our collective goldfish memory would have kicked in eventually to make us forget the magnitude of the deal. Instead of moving like the slow and steady tortoise, waiting it out to see how the Trump presidency would manoeuvre, Young bolted from the races like an impatient hare, likely in an ­attempt to catch the UNC with its pants down.

Just before the finish line of the general election, Young appears out of gas. So, too, is T&T, literally. Given the bad deals we’ve already made, epitomised by the Dragon gas deal, and the ones we’ll likely make in the future, epitomised by the Sandals Resort in Tobago, whoever becomes the next prime minister must urgently develop an economic and diplomatic policies to—and I hate to admit this—get on Trump’s “good” side.

Like it or not, Trump will always put America first, and this will usually happen at the expense of the global economy. Of course, the US stands to lose as well, but economies such as ours are more fragile—even more so when that economy relies so heavily on ­non-renewable resources such as oil and natural gas. The deals we make therefore must be carefully thought out.

Our economy is teetering on a precipice, and the now-dead Dragon gas deal threatens to push us over the edge. We need fewer bad-deal ­bobolees. • Dr De Matas is an assistant professor at the University of Texas Medical Branch.

.