Cur­tis Williams

cur­tis.williams@guardian.co.tt

Dr Fuad Khan, the long-serv­ing Mem­ber of Par­lia­ment for Barataria/San Juan has bowed out of pol­i­tics af­ter he told the UNC screen­ing com­mit­tee last night that he does not want to be its stan­dard-bear­er in the up­com­ing gen­er­al elec­tion.

“You ever think you want to go be­fore the sun sets? You go be­fore the sun is set,” a sur­prised Khan told Guardian Me­dia.

He ex­pressed con­cern with the speed that his de­ci­sion was re­layed to Guardian Me­dia, ini­tial­ly say­ing no com­ment but even­tu­al­ly ac­cept­ing that his time in the Par­lia­ment had ef­fec­tive­ly come to an end.

Khan who bare­ly held on­to the seat in 2015 con­firmed to Guardian Me­dia that he had bowed out from the race say­ing he was leav­ing on his own vo­li­tion. For him, this is no po­lit­i­cal epi­taph.

“This is a per­son­al de­ci­sion and I had to be hon­est with my­self and hon­est with my leader and I will work 110 per cent to take who­ev­er can­di­date that I get. I will run it for them and I will car­ry them if I have to car­ry them,” Khan told Guardian Me­dia.

A urol­o­gist by pro­fes­sion, Khan has been the MP for 23 years, al­though he has been in and out of the Par­lia­ment.

He had ini­tial­ly said he was not seek­ing re-elec­tion but signed the nom­i­na­tion pa­pers and ap­peared be­fore the screen­ing com­mit­tee last night be­fore chang­ing his mind again.

In­sist­ing that he was still com­mit­ted to the peo­ple of Barataria/San Juan, the vet­er­an politi­cian said he had run out of sta­mi­na and re­alised the time had come to go.

“I love the peo­ple of Barataria/San Juan! I will con­tin­ue to work with them be­cause I have been there for them since 1984 as a doc­tor, I served them as a doc­tor, I served them as a rep­re­sen­ta­tive, but some­times you have to un­der­stand, hey broth­er, you get­ting old­er. I am 65 years old, let me spend a lit­tle time do­ing some­thing dif­fer­ent,” Khan re­vealed.

He ad­vised that to be a rep­re­sen­ta­tive re­quires a lot of work “and some­times you don’t have the sta­mi­na and with age the sta­mi­na goes.”

Khan in­sist­ed that he was not forced out by the Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar screen­ing com­mit­tee and said his joint pro­pos­al with the Ch­agua­nas West MP Gan­ga Singh to have a co-coali­tion to face the PNM in the up­com­ing polls was nev­er raised in the screen­ing.

Asked if win­ning the last elec­tion by on­ly 550 votes was ev­i­dence of wan­ing po­lit­i­cal strength in the key mar­gin­al con­stituen­cy, Khan dis­agreed.

He ar­gued: “The thing about it that in 2015 all the oth­er seats were lost, that was the on­ly seat that came home. So if you equat­ing that tech­ni­cal­ly I should have lost.”

Khan said even though he was mak­ing way for some­one else he was con­fi­dent that his con­stituents still want­ed him but said the time had come to pass on his knowl­edge to younger doc­tors, by train­ing a cadre of new urol­o­gists in the coun­try.

“Right now I want to con­cen­trate on the sur­gi­cal pro­fes­sion of urol­o­gy to take it to the high­est lev­el that it could be tak­en. I want to start train­ing young urol­o­gists. Its time to pass on what I know. You tend to have prac­ti­cal ex­pe­ri­ence that the books don’t show you and there is a need to pass it on­to the younger doc­tors. I learnt from the best in Lon­don at the In­sti­tute of Urol­o­gy and I want to put that to use to the younger peo­ple. My di­rec­tion in life is ser­vice in med­i­cine.”

Khan said it was up to the screen­ing com­mit­tee to de­cide who will re­place him and promised to work with the even­tu­al stan­dard-bear­er say­ing he re­mained a loy­al mem­ber of the UNC.