Gail Alexan­der

Any mo­tion of no con­fi­dence from a PNM con­stituen­cy against the par­ty's leader will be dealt with­in the bounds of the PNM's rules and Con­sti­tu­tion, PNM chair­man Con­rad Enill said yes­ter­day. Enill gave the as­sur­ance fol­low­ing a move by PNM's Diego Mar­tin West unit to for­mu­late such a mo­tion. The unit took the de­ci­sion at a month­ly con­stituen­cy meet­ing on Mon­day when mem­bers said they dis­cussed "cur­rent is­sues" in T&T– in­clud­ing de­vel­op­ments re­gard­ing the Ude­cott is­sue and were al­so ad­dressed by MP and for­mer min­is­ter Kei­th Row­ley. They said Row­ley spoke about the sit­u­a­tion over the last three years. Mem­bers said Row­ley sought their views on the Ude­cott is­sue. They added that 10 peo­ple who spoke had con­sen­sus with his views on this. They said Row­ley re­mind­ed mem­bers of the oath he took when he called for an en­quiry in­to Ude­cott– that he would re­sign if proven wrong.

One Diego Mar­tin con­stituent, who at­tend­ed, said there was con­cern whether the lead­er­ship was "mar­ketable con­sid­er­ing the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion." The Diego Mar­tin West chair­man plus cer­tain oth­er mem­bers of the ex­ec­u­tive were ab­sent from the meet­ing. At­ten­dees said they hoped to have the no con­fi­dence is­sue aired at PNM's Gen­er­al Coun­cil. The next coun­cil is March 20. The let­ter, giv­ing no­tice of it to PNM gen­er­al sec­re­tary Mar­tin Joseph, to whom all com­mu­ni­ca­tion goes, has not been fi­nalised by the unit, it was con­firmed up to yes­ter­day. The par­ty's con­sti­tu­tion has sev­er­al pro­ce­dures– in­clud­ing pe­ri­ods of no­tice for mat­ters to be aired at the Coun­cil, for deal­ing with re­place­ment of a leader and no con­fi­dence mo­tions, par­ty of­fi­cials in­clud­ing PNM PRO Jer­ry Narace con­firmed Wednes­day.

Yes­ter­day, Enill said he had not seen any let­ter from Diego Mar­tin West. Enill al­so made it clear that re­port­ed con­cerns in the com­mu­ni­ty on the Ude­cott is­sue had noth­ing to do with the par­ty. He said the spe­cif­ic is­sue on which there were con­cerns was a Gov­ern­ment is­sue. "The coun­try elect­ed a par­ty and the par­ty put a Gov­ern­ment in place," Enill added. At the end of the day, he said, the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty was in the hands of the head of the Gov­ern­ment and that per­son had tak­en ac­tion. Enill said all the process­es which were set up to deal with such is­sues were be­ing fol­lowed. Enill said he was not aware of any mem­ber of the PNM lead­er­ship be­ing in­volved in the mat­ter.