Joel Julien

joel.julien@guardian.co.tt

While many peo­ple called for the gov­ern­ment to use a heavy hand to deal with the COVID-19 threat, Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley yes­ter­day said his gov­ern­ment chose to in­stead trust the pop­u­la­tion to do the right thing, and he said that faith was re­paid.

Row­ley made the state­ment yes­ter­day as he spoke with em­ploy­ees of the Vic­tor E Mout­tet Com­pa­ny (VEM­CO) dur­ing a vis­it to sev­er­al man­u­fac­tur­ers.

“Pan­dem­ic or no pan­dem­ic as long as we are a dis­ci­plined peo­ple the fu­ture of the peo­ple of Trinidad and To­ba­go will al­ways be bright,” Row­ley said.

“When we were threat­ened with the com­ing of this virus many peo­ple in­sist­ed that we use the heavy hand of the law to beat you in­to shape to force you in­to com­ply­ing but be­cause of the na­ture of the threat where you at the in­di­vid­ual lev­el were re­quired to do cer­tain things this gov­ern­ment took the de­ci­sion that we will talk to you, we will work with you, we be­lieve in you, and once you trust the gov­ern­ment and we trust you to do right we will work our way through this to­geth­er,” Row­ley said.

Row­ley said so far the coun­try has done that well.

“We trust­ed the peo­ple and the peo­ple have re­spond­ed mag­nif­i­cent­ly we didn’t have to take you in­to a state of emer­gency, we didn’t have to beat you in­to shape, we gave you the in­for­ma­tion, we shared with you on a dai­ly ba­sis, we ed­u­cat­ed you, and you are in a bet­ter po­si­tion now than you ever could have been had we tak­en a dif­fer­ent ap­proach,” he said.

Row­ley thanked this coun­try’s cit­i­zens for be­ing co­op­er­a­tive, and the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty for be­ing un­der­stand­ing.

He said be­cause the gov­ern­ment kept fol­low­ing the ad­vice of the health­care pro­fes­sion­als we were able to man­age the pan­dem­ic.

Row­ley said while the coun­try has been eco­nom­i­cal­ly dis­turbed “once we are alive we will make a liv­ing.”

Last Thurs­day this coun­try’s en­tire man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor was giv­en the all-clear to re­turn to work as part of phase two of the phased re-open­ing of the econ­o­my.

Row­ley said we are now “open for busi­ness.”

Apart from VEM­CO the oth­er man­u­fac­tur­ers vis­it­ed by Row­ley yes­ter­day were Caribbean Pack­ag­ing In­dus­tries, Nes­tle, and TYE Man­u­fac­tur­ing.

Row­ley yes­ter­day heard from the man­u­fac­tur­ers re­gard­ing the mea­sures they have im­ple­ment­ed in re­sponse to COVID-19 and the strides they are mak­ing to en­sure pro­duc­tion.

Row­ley was ac­com­pa­nied by Trade and In­dus­try Min­is­ter Paula Gopee-Scoon and ad­vi­sor to the Prime Min­is­ter on agri­cul­ture Dr John Al­leyne.