Con­gress of the Peo­ple (COP) po­lit­i­cal leader Win­ston Dook­er­an says that there are strong de­mands for good gov­er­nance in T&T. Dook­er­an made the state­ment on Sat­ur­day at a COP work­shop on Pro­cure­ment Is­sues held at the COP's Op­er­a­tion Cen­tre, Char­lieville. Dook­er­an added that the de­mands for good gov­er­nance raised the is­sue of ethics and poli­cies in the sys­tem of gov­er­nance. "There must be the link be­tween ideas and votes, each in­ter­lock with the oth­er," he said.

"Ideas and votes must main­tain the sus­tain­abil­i­ty of democ­ra­cy." Dook­er­an re­ferred to his mantra for good gov­er­nance as ethics, uni­ty and pol­i­tics and added that there must be a high lev­el of in­tegri­ty in pub­lic life. The work­shop aimed to ad­dress the is­sue of ethics as a val­ue sys­tem in the gov­er­nance process. Al­so in at­ten­dance were Le­gal Af­fairs Min­is­ter Prakash Ra­mad­har, Min­is­ter in the Of­fice of the Prime Min­is­ter Rodger Samuel, Min­is­ter in the Min­istry of the Peo­ple and So­cial De­vel­op­ment Dr Lin­coln Dou­glas.

Oth­er pan­el­lists at the event were Afra Ray­mond, Win­ston Ri­ley, Boyd Reid and Suni­ty Ma­haraj. In his pre­sen­ta­tion, Ray­mond called for the es­tab­lish­ment of three in­de­pen­dent agen­cies: a pro­cure­ment reg­u­la­tor, pub­lic pro­cure­ment com­mis­sion and a na­tion­al pro­cure­ment ad­vi­so­ry body. Ray­mond said these must in­cor­po­rate such or­gan­i­sa­tions as the Min­istry of Fi­nance, To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly (THA), Trans­paren­cy In­ter­na­tion­al, Cham­ber of Com­merce and civic or­gan­i­sa­tions.