10
UWI TODAY
– SUNDAY 14 MAY, 2017
IN MEMORIAM
AMaster
Entrepreneur
The following is an excerpt from that citation, which
can be read in its entirety in our online version at
http://
sta.uwi.edu/uwitoday/default.asp
Mr. Chancellor,
The man standing before this distinguished company
has been designated Master Entrepreneur, and is Lord of
the ANSA McAL group of companies, the most powerful
business Empire in the land.
This capacious conglomerate rests on the successes of a
past whose enduring principles and practices seem to belong
to a world that believed in finding its own centre. But it is
also a modern enterprise with the anticipation, reflexes and
stretch in a centrifugal world to make and take the chance
before it properly leaves the bat.
It came into being in 1986, Mr. Chancellor when Mr.
Anthony Sabga’s ANSA Group purchased 330 million
stock units in the ailing Mc Enearney Alstons Group. This
audacious move was effected with uncommon seemliness
and civility. It was done without depriving any shareholder
of his interest. It brought job security to thousands.
Our postulant, Mr. Chancellor is too alert to possibilities
to be ever in the position of Alexander the Great who wept
because there were no more worlds to conquer. Out of the
contraction of the historic ANSA Fleming Merchant Bank
of 1994 he brought forth in triumph the ANSA Merchant
Bank. He is the influential creator and protector of the once-
threatened Grand Bazaar, the largest shopping mall in the
Caribbean. He is the engine that transformed twenty-nine
acres of swamp land at Westmoorings into a yielding estate
With his wife Minerva at the graduation ceremony of 1998, where he was conferred with the Doctor of Laws, honoris causa.
called Regents Park. And he is the sergeant continuing his
strides into the field of property development and installing
another man-made monument in the shape of the Bayside
Towers.
Mr. Chancellor, these islands have been blessed by the
special talents and the energies, the dreams and ambitions,
of all the people who came. European and African. Indian,
Chinese, and Portuguese Madeiran. Syrian-Lebanese and
Jew. Barbadian, Grenadian, Vincentian and Venezuelan
too. Early or late, voluntary or forced, legal or illegal, Mr.
Chancellor, each group has made its entry and stamped its
arrival in its own way. In recognizing the achievements of
Mr. Anthony Norman Sabga, we recognise the struggles to
belong of the man, and the entrepreneurial contribution to
economy and society of the community he comes out of.
Mr. Chancellor, a seven-year-old boy came to Trinidad
in 1930 without English, and without the proverbial two
cents to clink in his pants pocket. All he knew about the
tropics was the banana given to him by one of the stewards
on the Colombie as it left the port of Marseilles.
Who could have thought that he would have such
an impact on the economic and physical landscape of his
adopted country? Who would have dared to imagine it
except perhaps Anthony Sabga himself?
Wemust notice at onceMr. Chancellor, the nourishment
that came to Anthony Sabga from the fruitful meeting of the
different communities out there in the world. Anthony Sabga
moved in a public sphere that included Murli Kirpalani,
Timothy and Roodal and Soodeen. Contrary to some of
today’s fashionable rhetoric there were entrepreneurs of
African origin he could also draw upon: “I was motivated
by the counselling and advice of Black men of yesterday,
like Hodgkinson, Waterman, J.T. Johnson and Cyril Duprey.
The Sabga family of Northern Syria in the Ottoman
Empire started migrating to new beginnings in North
and South America when their lands were confiscated
towards the end of the 19th century. Even in those days,
Mr. Chancellor, Trinidad was a doorway into and out of
South America, and in 1902 Anthony Sabga’s great-uncle
found the place and the people hospitable and kindly.
When he came back from a visit to Syria in 1927 he was
accompanied by Norman Sabga, who would trade in cloth
until by sheer determination and sacrifice he would be able
to enter formally into commerce with his own haberdashery
store at 73 Queen Street. By 1930 he was able to send for his
wife and his family of three boys and three girls including
Anthony. Mr. Chancellor, some fellers really have it lucky.
The success of Anthony Sabga is associated byMr. Sabga
himself with a beloved father. Norman’s qualities as a man
and a provider for his family exist in the son’s respectful
memory as a memory and mythological inspiration:
“Although he was illiterate, he was my greatest mentor
and his principles of honesty and integrity were not only
admired byme but by the entire Syrian Lebanese community
who referred to him as the patriarch of the community. I
was perhaps made a man before my time; he made me feel
independent.” In due course he would purchase the very
property where his father started his business at the corner
of Queen andHenry Streets, and install the structure known
today as ANSA House.
The UWI St. Augustine
joins the national and
regional community in mourning the passing of
Honorary Graduate Anthony N. Sabga
,
ORTT
Chairman Emeritus of the ANSA McAL Group.
He passed away at the age of 94. In 1998, when
Sir Shridath Ramphal was Chancellor, Sabga was
conferred the honorary Doctor of Laws honoris
causa, for his contribution to the entrepreneurial
landscape of Trinidad and Tobago. In the citation
read at that ceremony by then public orator
Professor Emeritus Kenneth Ramchand, Sabga was
hailed as
“master entrepreneur”
who could not be
acknowledged without recognising
“the struggles
to belong of the man, and the entrepreneurial
contribution to economy and society of the
community he comes out of.”
