For­mer prime min­is­ter Patrick Man­ning says Ken Val­ley was one of the mod­ern stal­warts of the Peo­ple's Na­tion­al Move­ment. Val­ley died yes­ter­day morn­ing at his home, af­ter suf­fer­ing from colon can­cer.

Man­ning said Val­ley ac­cept­ed his in­vi­ta­tion to join the par­ty, af­ter the 33-3 de­feat in the 1986 gen­er­al elec­tions in T&T. Man­ning said Val­ley was ap­point­ed as one of the first six Op­po­si­tion sen­a­tors ap­point­ed by the PNM. "He was ex­treme­ly ef­fec­tive...He played a piv­otal role in the in­tel­lec­tu­al re­new­al of the par­ty and was in­deed the au­thor of the eco­nom­ic poli­cies that the PNM adopt­ed in 1987 and which we sus­tained fun­da­men­tal­ly till 2010," Man­ning said in a state­ment is­sued yes­ter­day.

He said those poli­cies were re­spon­si­ble for "a re­turn to eco­nom­ic growth for Trinidad and To­ba­go in 1992, af­ter sev­en years of de­cline, and con­sti­tut­ed the plat­form for the pros­per­i­ty that the na­tion en­joyed in the years af­ter­wards." He said Val­ley "brought in­to the fold so many of the ur­ban mid­dle-class, pro­fes­sion­als and busi­ness peo­ple, who had turned away from the PNM in the late sev­en­ties and ear­ly eight­ies. "Ken helped enor­mous­ly to make the PNM more at­trac­tive to a wider cross-sec­tion of cit­i­zens," he added. Man­ning said the peo­ple of T&T and the PNM "owe Ken Val­ley a great debt of grat­i­tude."

He said he was very pleased to ap­point him a deputy po­lit­i­cal leader of the PNM in 1997, a po­si­tion he held very suc­cess­ful­ly for just over ten years. Man­ning said Val­ley was a "trans­for­ma­tion­al min­is­ter" in three PNM ad­min­is­tra­tions. The San Fer­nan­do East MP said Val­ley "played the key role in the ra­tio­nal­i­sa­tion of the state en­ter­prise sec­tor, through which we were able to achieve greater eco­nom­ic ef­fi­cien­cy as well as in­creased at­trac­tive­ness of Trinidad and To­ba­go as a des­ti­na­tion for di­rect for­eign in­vest­ment." He said: "Bil­lions of dol­lars flowed in­to this coun­try as a re­sult of those ef­forts."