Richard Lord

Op­po­si­tion Leader Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar says that noth­ing is wrong with the Gov­ern­ment ap­prov­ing state lands for the con­struc­tion of a church at Heights of Gua­napo.

Per­sad-Bisses­sar said that in an in­ter­view dur­ing yes­ter­day's House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives tea break. It was her first in­ter­view since oc­cu­py­ing the seat of the Op­po­si­tion Leader. "Noth­ing is wrong worth giv­ing lands for a church, noth­ing is wrong with that. But why all the se­cre­cy?" she added. Per­sad-Bisses­sar ad­mit­ted that the for­mer Bas­deo Pan­day gov­ern­ment gave state lands to de­nom­i­na­tion­al boards for the con­struc­tion of schools years ago.

She said in the case of the church at the Heights of Gua­napo, there were sev­er­al unan­swered ques­tions. She asked: "What is the role of the state sec­tor in the project? What is the role of Shang­hai (Con­struc­tion Com­pa­ny) in this? Is there a role for Ude­cott (Ur­ban De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion of T&T)? Per­sad-Bisses­sar said Prime Min­is­ter Patrick Man­ning, who made a 53-minute state­ment on the is­sue Church/State re­la­tions, with par­tic­u­lar re­spect to the con­tro­ver­sial church, did not ad­dress the re­al con­cerns raised among the pop­u­la­tion.

In re­sponse to oth­er ques­tions, Per­sad-Bisses­sar said the is­sue over new seat­ing arrange­ments on the Op­po­si­tion bench­es was not of crit­i­cal im­por­tance to the peo­ple of T&T.