Two politicians and members of the People’s Partnership (PP) governing coalition are receiving T&T’s highest national award this year. Economist Winston Dookeran, the Foreign Affairs Minister and former labour leader Errol McLeod, who currently serves as Minister of Labour, will receive the Order of the Republic of T&T for outstanding service to the country.
Dookeran’s award is for distinguished contributions in economics, while McLeod’s award is for outstanding service in trade unionism and industrial relations, according to a Government release yesterday.
Dookeran, originally from Rio Claro, is the former political leader the Congress of the People (COP) which he co-founded in 2006. With a degree in economics and maths at the University of Manitoba, Canada and an Msc in Economics at the London School of Economics, University of London, UK, he has had a dinstinguished academic career, with many publications on developmental economics in the Caribbean. He lectured for 15 years at UWI on economics.
In 1981 Dookeran contested the constituency of Chaguanas as a candidate of the United Labour Front, and won. In 1986, when the ULF merged with other parties to form the National Alliance for Reconstruction (NAR), Dookeran again ran for the Chaguanas seat and won. Under the NAR he became a Cabinet minister, a minister of planning, and NAR deputy political leader. He acted as prime minister on several occasions, including during the 1990 attempted coup when prime minister ANR Robinson was taken hostage. He lost his seat in the 1991 elections.
Dookeran has been a senior economist at the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. He was also a member of the executive board of the Inter-American Development Bank and the governor of the Caribbean Development Bank. He was Governor of the Central Bank of T&T from 1997-2002.
In 2002 he joined the United National Congress (UNC) and won the St Augustine constituency. In October 2005 Dookeran succeeded Basdeo Panday as leader of the UNC. By 2006 he had formed his own political party, the COP, which would eventually join the PP alliance.
Errol McLeod, from La Romain, San Fernando, began his career begain in the oil business in the 1960s when he joined the Texaco Apprenticeship Training Scheme. He went on to work for the Pointe-a-Pierre refinery in many positions, including as an electrician and refinery operator. McLeod became a member of the Oilfield Workers Trade Union (OWTU) in the 1970s, rising to become its president general in 1987, until he retired in 2008.
He was a founding member of the United Labour Front in the mid-70s, when mainly black oil workers, mainly Indian sugarcane farmers and members of the Transport and Industrial Workers Union tried to form a multi-racial alliance of diverse interests under the name of the ULF. The ULF became a formal political party in 1976 “to unite the working class as a class for political struggle...” McLeod was elected MP for Oropouche on the ULF ticket in the 1976 elections.
Despite its intentions to become a multi-racial party, the ULF became the successor to the Democratic Labour Party, and came to represent largely Indian interests.
McLeod was political leader of the Movement for Social Justice (MSJ), a labour party that formed in early 2010. He resigned as MSJ leader in January 2012 to focus on his duties as Minister of Labour and MP for Pointe-a-Pierre.