Gail Alexan­der

This coun­try ap­pears to be an “an­nex” to Venezuela right down to us­ing the same mes­sages as the Venezue­lan Gov­ern­ment does, says UNC sen­a­tor David Nakhid.

This was among ac­cu­sa­tions Nakhid dished out to the Gov­ern­ment dur­ing Mon­day’s bud­get de­bate in the Sen­ate.

And Agri­cul­ture Min­is­ter Clarence Ramb­harat flung these and oth­er ac­cu­sa­tions right back when he spoke af­ter Nakhid, dis­miss­ing him as a “Just Come.”

Nakhid at­tacked T&T’s For­eign Af­fairs thrust es­pe­cial­ly on Venezue­lan, adding it seemed that Gov­ern­ment didn’t dare say any­thing dif­fer­ent to Venezuela on the is­sue of the Nabari­ma oil tanker whose 1.3 mil­lion bar­rels of oil car­go could hurt T&T’s ma­rine life if the ves­sel sunk.

Nakhid added T&T had to re­ly on a British MP to raise the is­sue of strand­ed T&T na­tion­als over­seas, “...And then (Gov­ern­ment) at­tacked him,” he not­ed.

Nakhid said the bud­get was a “kick the can down the road” pack­age lack­ing re­sources, squeez­ing the mid­dle class and poor and hold­ing no hope for youths. He pro­posed giv­ing tax break on the prop­er­ty tax to those who had well main­tained prop­er­ties and land­scap­ing. He said that could cre­ate paint­ing and land­scap­ing jobs.

At­tack­ing sev­er­al min­is­ters - such as Ramb­harat - as lack­ing ex­per­tise and ac­cus­ing Gov­ern­ment of sup­port­ing “nar­co-traf­fick­ers” from the One Per­cent, Nakhid was warned by Sen­ate Pres­i­dent Chris­tine Kan­ga­loo sev­er­al times to with­draw re­marks and be cour­te­ous, “You are in the Sen­ate,” she said cau­tion­ing him on lan­guage.

Ramb­harat im­me­di­ate­ly took aim at Nakhid from the start of his con­tri­bu­tion, ad­dress­ing him di­rect­ly. “I’m not pre­pared to lis­ten to the Count of Bahrain,” he said.

Not­ing Nakhid said he had been out of T&T for 39 years, Ramb­harat said, “Then you ent even out of ma­ter­ni­ty , you re­mind me of some­body who Just Come, you need to be schooled and I’ll help you!”

Ramb­harat, who slammed crit­i­cism by Nakhid and UNC sen­a­tor Damien Ly­der on T&T’s deal­ings with Venezuela, said Nakhid couldn’t talk about any­thing in T&T since he’d been away from here or so long ,”You just ar­rived!”

Ramb­harath at­tacked the way the PP Gov­ern­ment han­dled var­i­ous Agri­cul­tur­al op­er­a­tions from im­port­ing Tyson chick­en from the US and im­port­ing hon­ey to im­port­ing co­conut wa­ter from the Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic at lo­cal co­conut farm­ers’ per­il.

Ramb­harat re­it­er­at­ed plans by the Es­tate Man­age­ment Busi­ness De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny (EM­BD) to ter­mi­nate leas­es of peo­ple who failed to meet state agri­cul­tur­al land lease con­di­tions - to plant the land- and re­dis­trib­ute that land to peo­ple who want to plant crops to feed T&T.