JENSEN LA VENDE

Se­nior Re­porter

jensen.lavende@guardian.co.tt

Work­ers of the Na­tion­al Pro­gramme for the Up­keep of Pub­lic Spaces (NPUPS) are de­mand­ing their pay af­ter work­ing for sev­er­al fort­nights with­out com­pen­sa­tion.

Speak­ing with Guardian Me­dia in St James yes­ter­day, NPUPS em­ploy­ee Mary Ra­moutal said mount­ing bills and the lack of in­for­ma­tion, on top of not be­ing paid, is trou­bling.

“It didn’t have to reach to this, but they keep play­ing us games. You can­not be play­ing games with big peo­ple, so we de­cid­ed to come to the me­dia, to let them know that we’re se­ri­ous. All we need to do is get paid. That’s all we want; we pay.”

She added that the lack of pay­ment is mak­ing the Gov­ern­ment look bad.

In a What­sApp re­sponse to Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day, Min­is­ter of Rur­al De­vel­op­ment and Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Khadi­jah Ameen said the is­sue stemmed from an “ad­min­is­tra­tive er­ror” but did not spec­i­fy.

“I’ve been in touch with work­ers on What­sApp even while I was out of the coun­try and in an­oth­er time zone. Up to this morn­ing, work­ers reached out to me. We are work­ing to fix it. We have iden­ti­fied the is­sue, which is no fault of the work­ers. They have been per­form­ing very well.”

How­ev­er, Ra­moutal is not the on­ly NPUPS work­er com­plain­ing. An­oth­er em­ploy­ee, who did not want to be iden­ti­fied, said they were hired to clean the drains off the high­way and have been with­out pay­ment.

“We used to get paid fort­night­ly but now we get­ting paid month­ly. Some peo­ple get paid re­cent­ly but not all of us. We need the job so we don’t want to com­plain too much, but we need our monies. Some peo­ple get dou­ble salaries af­ter miss­ing a fort­night, but they still have mon­ey ow­ing,” the work­er said.

NPUPS start­ed as a pi­lot pro­gramme that ran for 13 weeks from De­cem­ber 15, 2025, to March 13, 2026.

The pro­gramme re­placed the Com­mu­ni­ty-Based En­vi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion and En­hance­ment Pro­gramme (CEPEP), which was scrapped un­der crit­i­cisms that it was lit­tered with cor­rup­tion.

The pro­gramme was lat­er ex­pand­ed across all 14 Mu­nic­i­pal Cor­po­ra­tions and em­ploys some 1,600 work­ers to main­tain recre­ation­al grounds and pub­lic spaces.

Ra­moutal said NPUPS work­ers are tired of the “run-around.”

She said some work­ers have had to bor­row mon­ey to get to work, and each time they re­quest their pay­ment, they are giv­en dif­fer­ent sto­ries as to why they can’t be paid.

“We went to Kent House. We went to the min­istry every day: Mon­day, Tues­day, Wednes­day. We have no fixed time. They’re sell­ing us dreams. They’re al­ways bring­ing some­body new. Miss this, Miss that, Mis­ter that. Some­times su­per­vi­sors and all call­ing them and they’re not an­swer­ing them. Yuh un­der­stand? So the su­per­vi­sors can­not tell us as work­ers noth­ing.”

She added that while she is not afraid of be­ing vic­timised, she just wants to be paid a fair day’s pay for hav­ing done a fair day’s work.

“All we need right now, we are fair­ly hard-work­ing peo­ple. And we just need to be fair­ly paid. That’s all we want. We just want to be paid. We don’t want some. We want to be paid.”