I saw a news­pa­per re­port where Jack Warn­er has brazen­ly claimed the cred­it for the ac­qui­si­tion by PTSC of 85 new bus­es and has bold­faced­ly de­clared that this lat­est ex­pan­sion of the PTSC fleet is an ini­tia­tive of the new coali­tion Gov­ern­ment. How­ev­er, for the record, in my ca­pac­i­ty as Min­is­ter of Works and Trans­port in the pre­vi­ous PNM Gov­ern­ment, I per­son­al­ly com­mis­sioned these same 85 new bus­es at a cer­e­mo­ny at the VM­COTT com­pound on May 18, one week be­fore the gen­er­al elec­tion. This fact was wide­ly re­port­ed in the na­tion­al me­dia.

The re­al­i­ty is that these new 35-seater and 45-seater bus­es, which are specif­i­cal­ly de­signed and built for use in rur­al and sub­ur­ban ar­eas, were or­dered, paid for, and re­ceived dur­ing the tenure of the pre­vi­ous PNM Gov­ern­ment, as part of PTSC's fleet ex­pan­sion pro­gramme, which saw the num­ber of bus­es on the road in T&T quadru­ple be­tween 2002 and 2010, from less than 100 in Jan­u­ary 2002 to over 400 in May 2010. It is pre­pos­ter­ous, there­fore, for Warn­er to claim that the ac­qui­si­tion of these bus­es is his idea or is as a re­sult of some­thing that he did.

What has re­al­ly hap­pened is that the pop­u­la­tion has been de­nied the use of these new bus­es for the last three months while Warn­er pro­cras­ti­nat­ed and dreamt up this lat­est at­tempt to mis­lead the pub­lic in­to be­liev­ing that he has ac­tu­al­ly done some­thing nov­el or use­ful. As I have said be­fore, it is high time that this new Gov­ern­ment does some work of its own, rather?than try­ing to shame­less­ly take the cred­it for PNM projects and pro­grammes. I can't imag­ine what Warn­er will do next, but I would not be sur­prised if he even­tu­al­ly claims that he built the in­ter­change!

Colm Im­bert

MP