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Wayne kublalsingh biography

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Kublalsingh the patriot, hero

As a cit­i­zen of T&T I will not al­low this op­por­tu­ni­ty to slip by in light the di­rec­tion in which our so­ci­ety is head­ing. I think that we have a true pa­tri­ot, a re­al hero and a page in the his­to­ry books of the fu­ture in Dr Wayne Kublals­ingh.His­to­ry will show that the ex­tra­or­di­nary men and women that put their lives on the line and stood up for not just them­selves but risk their own lives for oth­ers, come along cen­turies apart. All the pro­pa­gan­da in the world can­not stop a move­ment when its time has come.

It is al­so a fact that in most cas­es of mar­tyrs and he­roes such as Nel­son Man­dela, Ma­hat­ma Gand­hi, Mar­tin Luther King and oth­ers were all ed­u­cat­ed in­di­vid­u­als who took con­scious re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for the progress of their peo­ple and so­ci­ety.There is some­thing called nat­ur­al jus­tice and econ­o­mists make ref­er­ence to the in­vis­i­ble hand. I guess in the end things work them­selves out and re­li­gion recog­nis­es that God has the fi­nal say.

How­ev­er, in pol­i­tics it is be­lieved th

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What makes a man go so far?

Wayne Kublals­ingh, 53, en­vi­ron­men­tal ac­tivist and lit­er­a­ture lec­tur­er at UWI, who holds a PhD from Ox­ford Uni­ver­si­ty, shows no signs of let­ting up on his hunger strike, now in its 11th day. Kublals­ingh, who has not eat­en or drunk any­thing for the past 11 days, has vowed to con­tin­ue his fast on be­half of the High­way Reroute Move­ment un­til Gov­ern­ment "keeps its promise" to agree to an in­de­pen­dent tech­ni­cal eval­u­a­tion of the $7.2 bil­lion-dol­lar high­way from San Fer­nan­do to Point Fortin and to halt road works un­til the eval­u­a­tion is com­plete.

Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad- Bisses­sar has gone on record as say­ing that while she feels per­son­al grief at the self­in­flict­ed suf­fer­ing of Kublals­ingh, it is false to say she re­neged on a promise made to him. She main­tained that fol­low­ing meet­ings with him she al­ready met the de­mands of his group; sus­pend­ed work on the Mon De­sir por­tion of the high­way; ap­point­ed a tech­ni­cal re­view which was re­ject­ed by the High­way Reroute Move­ment; and cou

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Activist Dr. Wayne Kublalsingh at the Drummit2Summit event, St. James, Trinidad, April 18, 2009. Photo by Georgia Popplewell on Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. Image edited with permission.

Editor's note: In 2012 and 2014, Global Voices followed the story of activist and academic Dr. Wayne Kublalsingh, who undertook two separate hunger strikes to protest the construction of the Debe to Mon Desir section of a highway intended to link San Fernando to Point Fortin, two major hubs in southern Trinidad, which would displace many homes and damage the environment. Along with the Highway Re-Route Movement, Kublalsingh took legal action against the state, on the grounds that it continued the road works without consulting stakeholders. On October 26, 2020, the High Court upheld their claim.

The following interview by Nicole Vallie was originally published on Cari-Bois News. An edited version is republished here as part of a content-sharing agreement with Global Voices.

Wayne Kublalsingh's passion for the environment can be traced back to his childhood in Trinidad's sugarcane

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