Gail Alexan­der

UNC Ch­agua­nas West can­di­date Khadi­jah Ameen says she was mar­ried for five years and sub­se­quent­ly di­vorced, but nev­er changed her name from Ameen on her ID card.Ameen was ex­plain­ing her op­po­nent Jack Warn­er's claim that her name was re­al­ly Ros­tant.Ameen, dis­miss­ing what the UNC has de­scribed as Warn­er's lat­est "spin," said she was mar­ried to one Nigel Ros­tant sev­er­al years ago, but nev­er re­al­ly adopt­ed the name, since the mar­riage ex­pired be­fore her ID card did.

"I was born Khadi­jah Ameen, and that I re­main. It's my name. So Mr Warn­er's lat­est grab for head­lines is a mere non-is­sue," she said.Com­ment­ing on Warn­er's ac­cu­sa­tions about pipelines be­ing laid down in an area where he had a meet­ing, Ameen said that WASA project wasn't the on­ly one oc­cur­ring at this time. She said the projects were re­quest­ed by the res­i­dents and were be­ing in­sti­tut­ed af­ter Warn­er quit as MP, and the pro­grammes were ap­proved and on­go­ing long be­fore he an­nounced his meet­ing.

She said, "The con­trac­tors were ad­vised to ex­er­cise the least pos­si­ble in­con­ve­nience to res­i­dents and they com­plet­ed their project and closed the trench. The road is now pass­able. There are al­so oth­er roads which can be used to ac­cess Mr Warn­er's meet­ing."The most un­for­tu­nate thing is, goods and ser­vices are be­ing giv­en to the peo­ple and Mr Warn­er who says he's 'for the peo­ple,' is tak­ing is­sue with that."

Ameen said she nev­er sought to make an is­sue out of the fact that Warn­er's ILP used the Fred­er­ick Set­tle­ment Recre­ation Ground for a meet­ing with­out seek­ing per­mis­sion from the Pi­ar­co Re­gion­al Cor­po­ra­tion, un­der which that sec­tor falls.She said she in­stead called a mem­ber of his team and ad­vised them a foot­ball tour­na­ment was set for the grounds af­ter the ILP meet­ing and what­ev­er work the ILP could not fa­cil­i­tate to re­turn the ground to con­di­tion for the foot­ball match, the cor­po­ra­tion would com­plete.

"I would nev­er stop a par­ty us­ing a venue for a meet­ing," she said.Hit­ting Warn­er's "cam­paign of de­cep­tion," Ameen said, "Mr Warn­er hasn't talked is­sues. He's made peo­ple feel the ser­vices he's pro­vid­ed and will pro­vide are his per­son­al favours to them and isn't mak­ing it clear to peo­ple that it's gov­ern­ment ser­vices he gave them as MP.

"In the pock­ets of the con­stituen­cy which have been ser­viced by him, peo­ple are be­ing led to be­lieve they have been helped by him per­son­al­ly, and they haven't been told how the sit­u­a­tion re­al­ly works.He has cam­paigned on the claim that he's been Ch­agua­nas West's per­son­al god­fa­ther and he has ex­ploit­ed the op­por­tu­ni­ty of be­ing giv­en the UNC's strongest seat in 2007 to con­test. He has al­so ex­ploit­ed the peo­ple of the area by go­ing up against the par­ty that gave him the seat to care for the peo­ple in Ch­agua­nas West gen­uine­ly."