Jesse Ramdeo

Se­nior Re­porter

jesse.ramdeo@cnc3.co.tt

Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley has de­clared that he has “no re­grets” about his tenure as he looks to­ward re­tire­ment on Sun­day.

And as he pre­pares to ex­it the po­lit­i­cal land­scape, the Prime Min­is­ter says he has put his “life to ser­vice” and jok­ing­ly shared, “I some­times sing in the bath­room and my favourite tune is from the Sound of Mu­sic, some­where in my youth or child­hood, I must have done some­thing good.”

The com­ment came in a can­did fi­nal wide-rang­ing in­ter­view with jour­nal­ists from Guardian Me­dia, CCN TV6 and TTT at White­hall, Port-of-Spain, on Tues­day, which was broad­cast last night.

Row­ley re­flect­ed on his time in of­fice with a sense of ful­fil­ment, even as he ac­knowl­edged the chal­lenges faced by suc­ces­sive gov­ern­ments in steer­ing the na­tion through com­plex so­cial, eco­nom­ic, and po­lit­i­cal is­sues.

“You would have heard at least one Prime Min­is­ter I can think of, I think pos­si­bly two I know of, who would have said Trinidad and To­ba­go is a dif­fi­cult coun­try to gov­ern and it is large­ly be­cause we are a free peo­ple, who en­joy sig­nif­i­cant free­doms, free­dom to even waste your time, free­dom to play the fool, free­dom to make good when you can do bet­ter,” Dr Row­ley said.

He main­tained that con­trary to the be­lief by some in so­ci­ety, he had act­ed in the coun­try’s best in­ter­est, even if it meant mak­ing un­pop­u­lar de­ci­sions.

“I am not in the lega­cy busi­ness, you see thing about lega­cy and lega­cy and lega­cy, I’m not in that. I was in the busi­ness of say­ing this coun­try has been good to me. When I got in­to the po­lit­i­cal are­na, it was what I can do be­cause oth­er peo­ple be­fore me sac­ri­ficed.

“I wasn’t about run­ning to get the best-pay­ing job in the coun­try be­cause I had of­fers to work for oil com­pa­nies, I chose not to do that, I worked for the state.”

He said as he pre­pared to bow out of the coun­try’s lead­er­ship, he ac­cept­ed there would be mixed mem­o­ries of him.

“Some will re­mem­ber me for what they didn’t get and some will re­mem­ber me for what they achieved dur­ing my tenure and what I did to put them in a bet­ter po­si­tion.”

He added, “This coun­try has a good fu­ture and the whole ques­tion of lead­er­ship is some­thing that needs to be fair­ly as­sessed as part of the na­tion­al con­ver­sa­tion be­cause lead­er­ship is not easy. Any­body could fol­low and not even be no­ticed but once you are in a lead­er­ship po­si­tion, you be­come a tar­get for every­body, some for good, some for evil and if you are afraid of that, don’t ac­cept lead­er­ship. I have ac­cept­ed lead­er­ship and that is why I am not an­gry ex­cept with one per­son, who did one thing but every thing else I have no re­gret.”

Row­ley was al­so clear about his de­sire to en­sure a seam­less han­dover of lead­er­ship.

“What we are ex­pe­ri­enc­ing now is some­thing you haven’t ex­pe­ri­enced be­fore and some­thing ... peo­ple are try­ing to an­chor it in the Con­sti­tu­tion. I am en­sur­ing that the coun­try, as far as I am able to with­in the law of the coun­try and the PNM con­sti­tu­tion, I am try­ing to en­sure there is a smooth tran­si­tion, so that when I move out of this of­fice, that who­ev­er moves in, that the coun­try will not be dis­ad­van­taged and that it might even ben­e­fit and that is done with­in the Con­sti­tu­tion of the coun­try.”

Af­ter step­ping down as the coun­try’s leader on Sun­day, Row­ley will still serve as the PNM’s po­lit­i­cal leader. He said sim­i­lar pro­vi­sions will be made in­ter­nal­ly to en­sure par­ty op­er­a­tions are not ad­verse­ly af­fect­ed.

“When I move out as po­lit­i­cal leader, I don’t scat­ter the pearls. I en­sure that the PNM, if I am able to, is strength­ened and not weak­ened be­cause a strong PNM makes a strong Trinidad and To­ba­go,” he said.

While he did not say ex­act­ly when he will step down as par­ty leader, he as­sured there will be no clash­ing of heads with prime min­is­ter-elect Stu­art Young.

“I am not hold­ing on to any­thing, we are in tran­si­tion and that tran­si­tion is to en­sure that the PNM is not dis­ad­van­taged and the coun­try is not dis­ad­van­taged.”

Ad­dress­ing claims of a “dic­ta­tor-like ap­proach” in the ap­point­ment of Young as his suc­ces­sor, and that his ac­tion had placed par­ty mem­bers on edge and al­most caused an im­plo­sion with­in the PNM, Row­ley said, “If I am the on­ly dic­ta­tor that dic­tates by a se­cret bal­lot, then I could live with that. The se­lec­tion of a mem­ber of the par­lia­men­tary cau­cus to lead when I turned down the of­fer was done by se­cret bal­lot and you could jump high or you could dig low, that is a fact.

“It might have been the first time, it may not be the last time in the his­to­ry of this coun­try, but cer­tain­ly it was the first and for those who thought it was the on­ly way we could live is the way we lived like tod­dlers, when we are in fact geri­atrics, that is not log­ic. You are talk­ing about messy, have you seen a smoother trans­ac­tion?”

The PM pro­vid­ed fur­ther in­sight in­to why he did not step aside be­fore now al­though he had promised to do so be­fore.

“As the en­gaged Prime Min­is­ter in the mid­dle of the pan­dem­ic, I could not just walk away from the coun­try and sec­ond­ly, I had brought a lot of young peo­ple in­to pol­i­tics and in­to gov­ern­ment and I thought it was go­ing to be un­rea­son­able of me in 2020 to go off in my own com­forts and leave them in a pan­dem­ic and fight a gen­er­al elec­tion and on that ba­sis, to the sur­prise of my wife, I an­nounced I was con­tin­u­ing to con­test in 2020.”

The PM, who has served as the head of Gov­ern­ment since 2015, not­ed that while his ad­min­is­tra­tion has faced its fair share of crit­i­cism, the one in­ci­dent dur­ing his pe­ri­od in of­fice which drew his ire was when rape al­le­ga­tions were lev­elled against him and his fa­ther in Par­lia­ment by for­mer Peo­ple’s Part­ner­ship min­is­ter Ver­nel­la Al­leyne-Top­pin.

“If your con­duct is such that I don’t re­quire to re­spect you, I just wouldn’t dis­re­spect my­self. That Op­po­si­tion Leader, fac­ing a dif­fi­cult elec­tion with me as Op­po­si­tion Leader, you know what she did? She or­gan­ised for mem­bers of her Cab­i­net and Speak­er of the House to come to the Par­lia­ment and put on the Hansard that my fa­ther is a rapist and I am a rapist. That is on the Hansard, char­ac­ter mat­ters.”