Basdeo Panday, former Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, came to the funeral of Cheddi Jagan in 1997, and I was delegated to chaperone him. Not ten minutes into our ride to Georgetown, he told me that he believed that there should be shared governance in Trinidad and Tobago (T&T), as according to him, his country would not prosper in the way it should unless both the Indians and African were at the executive table making the important decisions. In those days I was still in my Westminster-type need for an opposition mode of thinking, and so a healthy discourse took place for most of the remainder of the journey.
