Govt gives Pan Trinbago

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The site of the abandoned Wrightson Road, Port-of-Spain Post Office has been identified as a proposed permanent, specially designed location for Pan Trinbago’s headquarters.

In making the disclosure Saturday evening at the Orchestra Finals of the National Steelband Music Festival at the Jean Pierre Complex, Port-of-Spain, Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley said Pan Trinbago had driven a “hard bargain” on the matter but that the arrangement will leave the organisation “in a location worthy of the home of steelband.”

“The Government and Pan Trinbago have agreed to a design for a headquarters building worthy of its location in the city of Port-of-Spain on Wrightson Road on the old post office site. And very soon when you see the architects’ rendering of what that building would look like, I am guaranteeing you that you will be proud because like everything else, it will look somewhere like a pan,” he said.

“And in the city of Port-of-Spain, the only city in the world that will have a building like that, Pan Trinbago and the Government will share that building with Pan Trinbago using its share of the building to support its financial ventures and be in a location worthy of the home where steelband was invented.”

The move seeks to settle longstanding questions related to the aborted Pan Trinbago structure at Trincity, located on property given to the steelband body in 2001 by the Basdeo Panday United National Congress administration. The skeletal structure has been frequently described by commentators as an “eyesore.”

Addressing the old Pan Trinbago site plan, Rowley said, “A government of Trinidad and Tobago, in attempting to promote and assist Pan Trinbago in the management of pan affairs, had given the steelpan movement a plot of land out in the east, just south of Trincity, for a Pan Trinbago headquarters and possibly a business site. Pan Trinbago stepped out haltingly to do that and I dare say it got not only stuck in the mud, but it literally became a national eyesore.”

Recently, however, the site has been identified as a proposed venue for construction of a cricket academy funded by the Indian conglomerate Reliance Industries Ltd.

PM Rowley confirmed this during the event, saying, “Not too long ago, a very distinguished Indian firm, very deeply involved in cricket and wanting to get involved to support West Indies cricket and their own venture, offered to partner with the Government to create on that site a cricket academy as now exists in Mumbai in Mahastra in India.

“The Government agreed to accept the proposal and the Government’s contribution to that cricket academy, which we hope will come to fruition in the not too distant future, was to put in the land as requested but to do so, we had to talk to Pan Trinbago and get them to agree to do an exchange where the Government will get back that piece of land in that location, get involved with the cricket academy there, and do something for Pan Trinbago elsewhere.”

Minister of Tourism, Culture and the Arts, Randall Mitchell, claimed in parliament last month that a check by attorneys had shown that legal title for the land had never formally passed to Pan Trinbago.

“They mamaguy the whole pan movement with this piece of land,” Mitchell told the House of Representatives.

There once was the promise of a resumption of work on the Trincity site, with Pan Trinbago president Beverly Ramsey-Moore promising the resumption of work in 2023.

The PM also addressed the ongoing furor over plans to “replace the caricatures of Christopher Columbus’ ships on the Coat of Arms with the steelpan.” He said “not surprisingly, it generated a plethora of conversations, not all of it good.”

“But I’m sure that at the end of the day, like independence, like other things that we didn’t absorb at their birth, the pan on the national Coat of Arms will be a symbol of honour for the people of Trinidad and Tobago.”

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