Port-of-Spain may­or and sup­port­er of the Peo­ple's Na­tion­al Move­ment Louis Lee Sing says for­mer prime min­is­ter Patrick Man­ning is to be blamed for the cur­rent state of af­fairs in T&T. Lee Sing al­so de­scribed Man­ning's sev­en-day march as "fool­ish." He made these com­ments while speak­ing to re­porters af­ter the Port-of-Spain City Cor­po­ra­tion's month­ly statu­to­ry meet­ing at City Hall, Knox Street, Port-of-Spain, yes­ter­day. He al­so crit­i­cised the one-year per­for­mance of the present ad­min­is­tra­tion.

It was dur­ing his re­port on the Fi­nance, Plan­ning and Re­source Al­lo­ca­tion Com­mit­tee that Lee Sing stopped to poke fun, say­ing Man­ning had "lost it."

When ques­tioned by re­porters af­ter the meet­ing Lee Sing said: "You see, what I want the pub­lic to recog­nise is that the peo­ple who con­tin­ue to fol­low Mr Man­ning like Karen Tesheira, Mustapha Ab­dul-Hamid, Gary Hunt...the coun­try is in a lot of tur­moil to­day and the coun­try has had to deal with all kinds of cor­rup­tion is­sues...new is­sues. "And I think the pop­u­la­tion is tired with that kind of thing," he said.

"And whether peo­ple want to ac­cept it or not, the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for the state of the coun­try to­day rests square­ly in the laps of Patrick Mervyn Au­gus­tus Man­ning." Lee Sing said he al­ways felt proud Man­ning was his po­lit­i­cal leader.

His ad­vice to the sus­pend­ed San Fer­nan­do East MP was to go home, open his church as he once promised and preach the gospel. He said those who were fol­low­ing Man­ning were be­ing led in­to a sana­to­ri­um. On the oth­er hand, how­ev­er, Lee Sing bashed the per­for­mance of Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship Gov­ern­ment. He said: "I think the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship has been an un­mit­i­gat­ed dis­as­ter in of­fice for the last year," he said. "No Gov­ern­ment a year old in the his­to­ry of the re­gion has had to deal with so much cor­rup­tion and so many mis­steps."

He said, too, there were too many rum­blings in the coali­tion gov­ern­ment in the con­text of good gov­er­nance and that was wor­ry­ing to him. Lee Sing re­peat­ed his calls for Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Min­is­ter Chan­dresh Shar­ma to re­spond to his nu­mer­ous let­ters and to ad­dress con­cerns sur­round­ing fund­ing for the up­lift­ment of the city.