Opposition Leader Kamla Persad-Bissessar has called the announcement of Stuart Young to replace Dr Keith Rowley as Prime Minister “undemocratic.”
Yesterday, Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley announced Energy Minister Young as his successor, after he revealed last week that he would be stepping down from the position before his term comes to an end.
He made the announcement during a media conference after a two-day People’s National Movement (PNM) Parliamentary Caucus at the Tobago Plantations.
However, a short while after she arrived at a UNC cottage meeting at the party’s headquarters at Mulchan Seuchan Road, Chaguanas, last evening, Persad-Bissessar weighed in on the development.
“Today, we have replaced a lazy, greedy, selfish old man, with a lazy, greedy, selfish young man,” she said.
Persad-Bissessar said the PNM was taking the path of US President Joe Biden and his Vice President Kamala Harris in the recently held United States presidential election, “by undemocratically anointing Stuart Young as his successor to be Prime Minister and like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, they will be defeated in the general election.”
On Friday, Persad-Bissessar said the Prime Minister’s decision to announce his retirement was a “clear admission of his failure to lead T&T effectively.”
Persad-Bissessar said then that, “(Rowley’s) legacy is one of failure, division, and despair, leaving a nation in darkness. He should do the honourable thing and call the elections.”
She added then, “He and his PNM MPs, most of whom he has foisted on the population as candidates for the 2025 general election, have brutalised businesses and impoverished citizens, allowed a violent crime crisis and destroyed every independent institution in T&T. Rowley and his Ministers have taken us to a failed state with a lame-duck Prime Minister and Government. The Government is in chaos.”