Stephon Nicholas

To­ba­go Cor­re­spon­dent

A grand drone show is be­ing planned for In­de­pen­dence Day cel­e­bra­tions.

This an­nounce­ment was made by Min­is­ter of Agri­cul­ture and Fish­eries Ravi Rati­ram dur­ing an in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia at the Di­vi­sion of Com­mu­ni­ty De­vel­op­ment and So­cial Pro­tec­tion in Scar­bor­ough, To­ba­go.

How­ev­er, Rati­ram de­clined to say whether the drone show would re­place the tra­di­tion­al In­de­pen­dence Day fire­works dis­play at the Queen’s Park Sa­van­nah in Port-of-Spain.

An­i­mal-rights ac­tivists, of­fi­cials at the near­by Em­per­or Val­ley Zoo and groups against noise pol­lu­tion have protest­ed ve­he­ment­ly in the past for the erad­i­ca­tion of fire­works from the cel­e­bra­tion.

Last year there were no In­de­pen­dence Day cel­e­bra­tions ow­ing to a na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty threat; how­ev­er, Rati­ram said all sys­tems are go for this year’s ac­tiv­i­ties, which will be done dif­fer­ent­ly with new el­e­ments in­tro­duced by Min­is­ter of Cul­ture Michelle Ben­jamin.

He re­vealed Min­is­ter of De­fence Wayne Sturge is lead­ing the charge in or­gan­is­ing the cel­e­bra­tions.

“We con­tin­ue to cel­e­brate our In­de­pen­dence; it’s some­thing we are very proud of as a peo­ple and a coun­try. This year we have a love­ly cel­e­bra­tion in store. We gonna be us­ing tech­nol­o­gy.

“I be­lieve we gonna have a beau­ti­ful drone show on the evening of In­de­pen­dence. We gonna have our na­tion­al in­stru­ment. To­day, as we cel­e­brate Steel­pan Day, I can say Hap­py Steel­pan Day to every­one and on In­de­pen­dence Day we gonna have pan on the road hap­pen­ing for In­de­pen­dence.”

Asked about the re­lo­ca­tion of the an­nu­al In­de­pen­dence pa­rade to a new area of the Queen’s Park Sa­van­nah, Rati­ram dis­missed con­cerns about pos­si­ble en­croach­ment of green spaces at the Sa­van­nah.

“It have no sort of en­croach­ment or any­thing to be wor­ried about,” Rati­ram said.

Asked whether ap­provals were grant­ed by his min­istry pri­or to the com­mence­ment of con­struc­tion of the tem­po­rary pa­rade site, Rati­ram di­rect­ed all queries to his Cab­i­net col­league.

“The best per­son to an­swer those things, as I tell you, would be the Min­is­ter of De­fence. When you speak of all dif­fer­ent here, there and every­where, those things you would have to speak to the min­is­ter ...in terms of what is be­ing put to­geth­er for the In­de­pen­dence pa­rade. But, of course, I have full con­fi­dence in all my col­leagues and every­thing that my col­leagues do.”

He said the pub­lic can ex­pect a clean Sa­van­nah be­fore and af­ter the pa­rade cour­tesy the Min­istry of Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment, a se­cure en­vi­ron­ment through the sup­port of the Min­istry of Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty and cul­ture on dis­play through Ben­jamin.

Rati­ram urged the pub­lic to put aside pol­i­tics and “en­joy the cel­e­bra­tions as a unit­ed na­tion, as a unit­ed coun­try and as one peo­ple.”