Leader of the Op­po­si­tion Dr Kei­th Row­ley has re­ject­ed Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar's of­fer to join in talks to de­ter­mine what as­sis­tance T&T will pro­vide to Cari­com states af­fect­ed by Hur­ri­cane Tomas.Per­sad-Bisses­sar ex­tend­ed the in­vi­ta­tion to Row­ley on Mon­day, ask­ing that what­ev­er as­sis­tance to be pro­vid­ed must re­sult in some ben­e­fit to T&T na­tion­als.

She said if the Cari­com states want­ed hous­es con­struct­ed, then T&T na­tion­als must be hired to con­struct the units.But Row­ley, in a state­ment yes­ter­day, said he "to­tal­ly re­jects this back­ward, colo­nial pol­i­cy and will have noth­ing to with such dis­cus­sions or con­cept."

He said he would have noth­ing to do with "hu­man­i­tar­i­an re­lief from the peo­ple of T&T to Cari­com that is tied to con­di­tion­al­i­ties of self-in­ter­est as out­lined by our Prime Min­is­ter."He said he want­ed to re­mind cit­i­zens that it was Per­sad-Bisses­sar who "in­sult­ed" Cari­com cit­i­zens re­cent­ly, when she said T&T was not an ATM ma­chine for the re­gion.

Row­ley al­so said the in­fa­mous "teacup" af­fair in­volv­ing Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Min­is­ter Chan­dresh Shar­ma and him­self, years ago, be­gan when Shar­ma "ac­cused me of be­ing a racist for sup­port­ing the Man­ning ad­min­is­tra­tion's aid to Grena­da which was dev­as­tat­ed by Hur­ri­cane David."

Row­ley, in his state­ment said: "We be­lieve that in sit­u­a­tions like these, we are un­con­di­tion­al­ly our broth­ers' keep­er, to the best of our abil­i­ty."He said the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship Gov­ern­ment, in its at­tempts to be dif­fer­ent and to change our coun­try, "is reck­less­ly at­tack­ing every­thing PNM cre­at­ed, sup­port­ed or stood for."

Row­ley added: "In this quest to be so dif­fer­ent, this ac­tion as ad­vo­cat­ed by the Prime Min­is­ter can on­ly serve to bring us shame and cost us our valu­able lead­er­ship role in Cari­com, which is so vi­tal to our own eco­nom­ic ex­is­tence."