Ryan Ba­choo

Don’t go down that road!

That was Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley’s re­sponse to claims by Pun­dit Satyanand Ma­haraj that ur­ban youth along the East-West cor­ri­dor are tar­get­ing East In­di­ans.

Speak­ing on the is­sue for the first time yes­ter­day at the PNM’s Sports and Fam­i­ly Day in To­co, he said: “When the Op­po­si­tion Leader and two or any oth­er num­ber of pun­dits want to get up in this coun­try and say that the crime we are all fac­ing, that we are all ex­posed to, that we are all vic­tims of, when they want to get up and say that it is black peo­ple who are at­tack­ing In­di­an peo­ple, I say to­day you all stop that! Don’t go down that road! That’s a road of no re­turn.”

The Prime Min­is­ter al­so ad­dressed the bomb threats last Fri­day that sent more than 100 schools across the coun­try in­to pan­ic.

“You think that it is ac­ci­den­tal, that, on the very day that they are hav­ing a vote of no con­fi­dence in the Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty who they had been pil­lo­ry­ing non-stop, that on that day, you wake up in the morn­ing and vir­tu­al­ly every school in the coun­try has a bomb threat?” he asked.

“You think that’s a joke? You think that’s by ac­ci­dent? You know that if you shut down every school in this coun­try by call­ing in a bomb threat, the chaos and trau­ma that you will cause to those chil­dren and the fear in their par­ents? Of all the days in the year, the one day that hap­pens is the day when they are com­ing to the Par­lia­ment to move a vote of no con­fi­dence in the Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter.”

Row­ley used his 48-minute ad­dress at the event to chas­tise the Op­po­si­tion who were at the same time launch­ing their new head­quar­ters on Mulchan Seuchan Road in Ch­agua­nas.

He told PNM sup­port­ers that “these are dif­fi­cult days in Trinidad and To­ba­go but let us not make them more dif­fi­cult than they should be.”

He al­so dou­bled down on his de­ci­sion not to meet with for­mer Na­tion­al Trans­for­ma­tion Al­liance (NTA) po­lit­i­cal leader Gary Grif­fith and Op­po­si­tion Leader Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar to dis­cuss a crime plan. “It is not go­ing to be easy es­pe­cial­ly when those who should con­tribute to the fight be­come part of the prob­lem,” he said

Row­ley fur­ther re­vealed that when the Po­lice Ser­vice Com­mis­sion (PSC) sent a for­mer ap­peal judge to look in­to what was hap­pen­ing in the Firearms Unit of the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice, the judge re­port­ed that what he saw was “a well-oiled crim­i­nal en­ter­prise.”

He al­so re­ject­ed the Op­po­si­tion’s call to break up the Min­istry of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty in­to two arms in­clud­ing a Min­istry of Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty and a De­fense Min­istry and struck down Per­sad-Bisses­sar’s “stand your ground” pro­pos­al.

“When the Op­po­si­tion Leader says that their an­swer to their sup­port­ers’ call for de­fence from the crim­i­nal el­e­ment is to pass in the Par­lia­ment of this coun­try stand your ground leg­is­la­tion, I want to ask the Op­po­si­tion Leader, what ground are they go­ing to stand on to kill any­body they want to kill and say sim­ply I was afraid of that per­son, that per­son was about to at­tack me in the road or in my yard and I killed them? The crime for pick­ing a man­go in some­body’s yard can­not be be­ing shot to death,” he said

He lat­er added that there are peo­ple in this coun­try with many ques­tions to an­swer who move to en­sure that their mat­ters nev­er end up in a court of law.

“We must re­ject peo­ple, whether they are in pol­i­tics, in the me­dia, or wher­ev­er they are, who be­lieve that you can take ad­van­tage of the peo­ple of Trinidad and To­ba­go and as long as you have the means–and by means I mean mon­ey and con­tact. You can fol­low a line which is now get­ting clear­er and clear­er in Trinidad and To­ba­go that once you are big in the dance, once you are ac­cused to have com­mit­ted cer­tain of­fences, you will take ac­tion so that your mat­ter will nev­er come to the court,” Row­ley said.

He al­so slammed those against the move to make the Caribbean Court of Jus­tice (CCJ) the fi­nal court of ap­peal in the coun­try. Point­ing out that the CCJ’s head­quar­ters is based in Port-of-Spain, Row­ley once again took aim at the Op­po­si­tion Leader, say­ing: “Oth­er Caribbean coun­tries are one by one join­ing the CCJ be­cause even some who are ap­pre­hen­sive have seen the val­ue but we be­lieve that is be­cause a few well-monied peo­ple can go to the Privy Coun­cil once in a while on mat­ters that they choose, but we have to wait un­til the Eng­lish­man tells us that some­thing is good be­fore it is good.”

Dis­man­tling Ser­vice Com­mis­sions

The Prime Min­is­ter al­so used his speech to an­nounce that in 2024 he will move to dis­man­tle Ser­vice Com­mis­sions. He ex­plained his ra­tio­nale for the move say­ing that “all of our pub­lic ser­vices are un­der-per­form­ing” be­cause they do not have prop­er man­age­ment arrange­ments in place.

“These so-called in­de­pen­dent ser­vice com­mis­sions that are ham­string­ing this coun­try, there are cer­tain things that will nev­er change, will nev­er im­prove as long as ba­sic man­age­ment tenets are not be­ing met,” he said.

Row­ley says what he wants in the 21st cen­tu­ry is to abol­ish all the ser­vice com­mis­sions and re­place them with one tri­bunal. He says the pur­pose of the ser­vice com­mis­sions in 1962 was to pro­tect peo­ple from ar­bi­trary ac­tion from the in­com­ing gov­ern­ment and there were fears that there would be racial dis­crim­i­na­tion thus the need for in­de­pen­dent ser­vice com­mis­sions.

“Those ser­vice com­mis­sions are in­im­i­cal to good or­der,” he said.

Row­ley point­ed to the thou­sands of teach­ers across the 400 schools in the coun­try and claimed that there is a “part-time ser­vice com­mis­sion once in a while” that slows down the process for dif­fer­ent things. The same, he added, could be said of the Po­lice Ser­vice Com­mis­sion and the Statu­to­ry Au­thor­i­ties Ser­vice Com­mis­sion.