Coat of arms with steelpan unveiled after Lower House approval

THE updated national coat of arms that was recently passed in the House of Representatives was officially unveiled on January 19 in a post on social media by the Ministry of Communications.

The National Emblems of Trinidad and Tobago (Regulation) (Amendment) Bill, 2025, which allowed for the replacement of illustrations representing ships led by explorer Christopher Columbus with the national instrument, the steelpan, was unanimously passed in the Lower House on January 13.

The coat of arms now features the image of a gold steelpan and pan sticks where Columbus’s ships once were.

In piloting the bill, Minister of Tourism, Culture and the Arts Randall Mitchell said, “Government’s proposal was made in direct response to the loud and decades-long clarion calls of our citizens clamouring for the removal of painful colonial vestiges of our past.”

The Prime Minister concurred during his contribution in Parliament, saying, “Symbolism matters. It’s not a question of either/or; we can have it all. We can have symbols, we can have jobs, we can have food. But at the end of the day, symbolism matters.”

He said replacing the ships with the national instrument showed “pan has reached the highest heights in TT.”

He added, “…but the symbol says that we don’t accept what you think of us and if, when we came here, we picked up the pan that used to carry oil and hit it in a way that we discovered that we could make music, and we now make the magic that comes out of the steelband, then we should be proud to say that we claim that on our coat of arms and not the misrepresentation of (Columbus’s ships)”

The bill will be read and debated in the Upper House (Senate). Once passed in the Upper House, it will then proceed to be proclaimed by the President, after which it will become law.

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