For­mer PNM Sen­a­tor Nafeesa Mo­hammed has ac­cused the par­ty’s po­lit­i­cal leader, Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley of “dis­grace­ful be­hav­iour,” and ad­vised him to “get some help,” say­ing he needs “se­ri­ous treat­ment.”

Speak­ing on Tues­day evening at a meet­ing in El So­cor­ro in sup­port of the UNC Can­di­date for Barataria/San Juan.

Mo­hammed took um­brage with state­ments made by the PNM po­lit­i­cal leader at a meet­ing in Ch­agua­nas East: “What re­al­ly trip me off, I could not be­lieve my ears when I got a clip of Dr Kei­th Christo­pher Row­ley speak­ing at a po­lit­i­cal meet­ing, I think in the con­stituen­cy that Clarence seek­ing to rep­re­sent and he had the au­dac­i­ty to say that I be­came a se­nior le­gal ad­vis­er to the Prime Min­is­ter be­cause I could not feed my fam­i­ly.”

Mo­hammed de­scribed the state­ment as “the most de­mean­ing, dis­grace­ful, dis­gust­ing state­ment.”

She in­sist­ed that what tran­spired was quite dif­fer­ent: “You are telling me I was beg­ging for a po­si­tion to be a se­nior le­gal ad­vis­er, but you are the one who asked me to come and help you, you are the one who asked me to come and work with you.”

Mo­hammed ac­cused Row­ley of treat­ing “women with a cer­tain amount of dis­dain.”

She urged him to “get some help, you need some se­ri­ous treat­ment. You are a per­pe­tra­tor of po­lit­i­cal abuse and I am not the first or the on­ly woman in Trinidad and To­ba­go who has had to en­dure your dis­grace­ful be­hav­iour.”

She said she ex­pect­ed more of the per­son who held the of­fice of Prime Min­is­ter.

“I re­spect the of­fice but I al­so ex­pect you to con­duct your­self in a dif­fer­ent way and treat peo­ple with re­spect man,” Mo­hammed said.

De­clar­ing that “democ­ra­cy is un­der threat,” Mo­hammed said “judge­ment day is on the 10th of Au­gust and we have to let our fin­gers speak.”

She said her par­ents had taught her “to stand up for prin­ci­ple and for what is right,” and while she had been faith­ful to the PNM some­times even go­ing against her fam­i­ly, she could not do it any longer.

Hav­ing switched al­le­giances Mo­hammed said for the first time she had put on a “yel­low robe,” and was now sup­port­ing the UNC can­di­date for Barataria/San Juan Sad­dam Ho­sein.

She urged the peo­ple of El So­cor­ro, who she said had been “paint­ed with the brush of ter­ror­ism” by the Row­ley ad­min­is­tra­tion fol­low­ing raids on homes and a mosque in the com­mu­ni­ty, to let their fin­gers do the talk­ing on elec­tion day.

“Go to the polls let your fin­gers speak for truth, let us speak for jus­tice,” she urged.