Eliz­a­beth Gon­za­les

Chief Sec­re­tary Far­ley Au­gus­tine be­lieves the To­ba­go au­ton­o­my bills are be­ing hur­ried­ly tak­en to Par­lia­ment on Mon­day be­cause Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley plans to dis­solve Par­lia­ment lat­er this month and call the gen­er­al elec­tion ear­ly.

Speak­ing to the me­dia yes­ter­day at the Low­lands Mul­ti­pur­pose Fa­cil­i­ty, he crit­i­cised the process, say­ing there wasn’t enough con­sul­ta­tion with To­bag­o­ni­ans and key stake­hold­ers, in­clud­ing Op­po­si­tion mem­bers and the In­de­pen­dent bench.

“The on­ly thing that will ex­plain, log­i­cal­ly, this haste, is that the Prime Min­is­ter wants to dis­solve the House soon and so he wants to ma­m­aguy To­bag­o­ni­ans and say ‘I put some­thing be­fore the Par­lia­ment and it didn’t pass’ and hope­ful­ly, he could win the elec­tion on such a premise.”

He again out­lined four non-ne­go­tiable el­e­ments for the bills: a fed­er­al sys­tem, a clear ter­ri­to­r­i­al de­f­i­n­i­tion for To­ba­go, equal sta­tus with Trinidad, and the right for To­bag­o­ni­ans to make de­ci­sions about their own gov­er­nance.

With­out these, Au­gus­tine ar­gued the bills fall short and need re­vi­sion.

He al­so ac­cused the Gov­ern­ment of re­peat­ed­ly fail­ing to ad­dress To­ba­go’s de­mands for au­ton­o­my, call­ing it a “his­tor­i­cal in­jus­tice.”

He said the bills, as they stand now, don’t meet the ex­ist­ing de­mands. Au­gus­tine in­sist­ed the bills should re­flect the will of To­bag­o­ni­ans, not the pref­er­ences of the Cen­tral Gov­ern­ment.