Mem­ber of Par­lia­ment for Princes Town, Bar­ry Padarath MP, has de­scribed as “a po­lit­i­cal gim­mick” the an­nounce­ment made by Min­is­ter of Pub­lic Util­i­ties, Mar­vin Gon­za­les MP, that WASA will em­bark on a road re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion ex­er­cise.

In an of­fi­cial state­ment, MP Padarath ac­cused the Gov­ern­ment of “gov­ern­ing by an­nounce­ments with lit­tle or no fol­low up ac­tion”.  The Princes Town MP called on the Pub­lic Util­i­ties Min­is­ter to im­me­di­ate­ly pub­lish a com­pre­hen­sive and de­tailed list of roads that will be re­ha­bil­i­tat­ed over the cur­rent fi­nan­cial year, with clear dates for com­mence­ment and com­ple­tion.

MP Padarath, who is the Op­po­si­tion’s Shad­ow Min­is­ter for Pub­lic Util­i­ties, ob­served that ear­li­er this year, the gov­ern­ment an­nounced that the Min­istry of Works and Trans­port would meet with WASA in an ef­fort to work to­geth­er on pot­hole patch­ing and road re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion.  He went on to note that on­ly a few months ago, the Min­is­ter of Works and Trans­port al­so an­nounced a $300 mil­lion al­lo­ca­tion for road re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion and patch­ing.

The Shad­ow Pub­lic Util­i­ties Min­is­ter ques­tioned what be­came of those an­nounce­ments since, he said, there has been no tan­gi­ble ev­i­dence that these an­nounce­ments ever ma­te­ri­al­ized.

He al­so wants clar­i­fi­ca­tion on the bud­get for the pro­posed road paving ex­er­cise un­der WASA and how con­trac­tors would be se­lect­ed for this pro­gram.

“Gov­ern­ment is mind­ful that the pop­u­la­tion is weary of their non-per­for­mance and their emp­ty promis­es, there­fore the an­nounce­ment of a road paving ex­er­cise un­der WASA is noth­ing more than a po­lit­i­cal gim­mick to give the im­pres­sion that some­thing pro­duc­tive was hap­pen­ing at WASA,” the Princes Town MP stat­ed.

Ac­cord­ing to MP Padarath, the re­cent rev­e­la­tion that WASA pro­vides on­ly six­teen per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion with a 24-hour sup­ply of wa­ter high­lights the in­ef­fi­cien­cy of the cur­rent Min­is­ter and ad­min­is­tra­tion to ad­dress the woes at WASA.