Gail Alexan­der

Se­nior Po­lit­i­cal Re­porter

Mal­abar and the rest of the coun­try have been put on no­tice to help the Op­po­si­tion Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress (UNC) “ob­serve the lick­ing they will get on elec­tion day” by Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley who said the cam­paign of the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) will fo­cus on lo­cal gov­ern­ment re­form.

He made these com­ments at a PNM pub­lic meet­ing at the Mal­abar Com­mu­ni­ty Cen­tre on Thurs­day night af­ter re­ject­ing the UNC’s call for in­ter­na­tion­al ob­servers for the elec­tion.

At the meet­ing, Row­ley wel­comed for­mer UNC coun­cil­lors Shel­don “Fish” Gar­cia and Samuel Sankar who both re­signed from the op­po­si­tion par­ty re­cent­ly. Gar­cia is seek­ing to be the PNM’s Ari­ma Cen­tral can­di­date.

Row­ley said that based on the PNM’s record he is not sur­prised the par­ty is win­ning more friends and in­flu­enc­ing more peo­ple.

He paid trib­ute to for­mer PNM Princes Town MP Amoy Mo­hammed and led the gath­er­ing in ob­serv­ing a minute’s si­lence on her pass­ing.

Row­ley told par­ty sup­port­ers that even if the elec­tion date is the “tenth of Nev­er-em­ber”, the sin­gu­lar is­sue for the PNM at the polls is lo­cal gov­ern­ment re­form.

“If you’re for that you should vote PNM. If you don’t agree it’s wor­thy of your vote and vote UNC, you’re say­ing you want it to re­main as it is...Win, lose or draw our mis­sion is to con­tin­ue to im­prove the qual­i­ty of life in Trinidad and To­ba­go by im­prov­ing lo­cal gov­ern­ment de­liv­ery,” he said.

Claim­ing that the UNC fi­nal­ly had some­thing to cam­paign on with the Privy Coun­cil judg­ment, Row­ley lev­elled sev­er­al ac­cu­sa­tions against the Op­po­si­tion and its leader, from hav­ing noth­ing good to say, to pro­tect­ing wrong­do­ers, carv­ing out paths for peo­ple to es­cape ac­count­abil­i­ty and stand­ing in the breach for and be­ing a “mouth­piece for crim­i­nals.”

He said: “They’re on a per­pet­u­al cam­paign of bad-mouthing and mis­rep­re­sent­ing this coun­try! They on­ly come alive when it’s time to make ‘man­i­ma’ over some­body who has prob­lems with the law!”

Row­ley de­tailed the prob­lems the gov­ern­ment has had with the UNC on leg­is­la­tion, lo­cal gov­ern­ment re­form, the Privy Coun­cil judg­ment and the par­ty’s claims of po­lit­i­cal per­se­cu­tion in the Pi­ar­co case in Mi­a­mi.

“I ask you to ig­nore the UNC. Every day they have noth­ing use­ful to tell you just nya, nya, nya, nya!”

Row­ley re­ject­ed the UNC’s de­scrip­tion of him as “lazy” and list­ed the work be­ing done by his ad­min­is­tra­tion. He said he was glad Op­po­si­tion Leader Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar knew the word “shame” af­ter her par­ty’s record, court rul­ings and the Pi­ar­co project.

He ac­knowl­edged the sem­i­nal role of Faris Al-Rawi “who for sev­en years in the of­fice of At­tor­ney Gen­er­al” stayed the course on the Pi­ar­co case “and de­liv­ered to the peo­ple.”

Row­ley said as Prime Min­is­ter and head of the Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Coun­cil he knows “a lot of things you don’t know about and in some cas­es, I’m re­strained by the courts to tell you what I know. In oth­er cas­es even ba­sic de­cen­cy re­quires I don’t tell you.”

Re­fer­ring to a court mat­ter which he said at­tempt­ed to “pre­vent the Prime Min­is­ter from telling the Par­lia­ment what the Prime Min­is­ter knows,” Row­ley added: “I want you to ask your­self what is it that the Prime Min­is­ter knows that this in­di­vid­ual doesn’t want the Par­lia­ment to know. In To­ba­go, they have a say­ing, moon does run but deer catch up.”