PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

There was an al­most Car­ni­val-es­que gath­er­ing along Bound­ary Road and Bound­ary ex­ten­sion as sup­port­ers of UNC can­di­dates Sad­dam Ho­sein and Al­hoy Hunt host­ed a joint walk­a­bout in the area yes­ter­day.

Pow­ered by two mu­sic trucks, scores of peo­ple fol­lowed the two can­di­dates along the road­way dur­ing the meet and greet. Some with masks, oth­ers with­out. The trucks oc­ca­sion­al­ly en­cour­aged the con­verg­ing groups to main­tain a lev­el of so­cial dis­tanc­ing to min­i­mal ef­fect.

The road serves as the con­stituen­cy bound­ary be­tween the seats -Barataria/San Juan and St. Joseph re­spec­tive­ly, which the two can­di­dates are con­test­ing.

"We're on the bound­ary road which is our bound­ary ac­tu­al­ly. One half of the road is my one which is the west­ern side of the road and the east­ern side is colonel Al­hoy Hunt. So we have seen that per­sons are com­ing out, the show­ing of force re­al­ly is a demon­stra­tion that peo­ple of this coun­try are fed up and that they are ready to in­stall a Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress gov­ern­ment," said Ho­sein dur­ing the walk­a­bout yes­ter­day.

Hunt told Guardian Me­dia that the walk­a­bout was not put to­geth­er due to the rel­a­tive­ly short cam­paign time al­lowed due to the Ju­ly 3 an­nounce­ment of the Au­gust 10 poll.

"It was some­thing that was al­ready planned it just came about again be­cause the elec­tion has been called so it's just one of an­oth­er tac­tic that we're us­ing and bring the peo­ple out and give a good show­ing that both con­stituen­cies are unit­ed for one com­mon cause," said Hunt.

The two seats are tra­di­tion­al­ly con­sid­ered mar­gin­al seats with the Barataria/San Juan con­stituen­cy de­cid­ed by a mar­gin of 550 votes in 2015.