Jesse Ramdeo

A dri­ve for progress or­gan­ised by the Trinidad and To­ba­go Scrap Iron Deal­ers As­so­ci­a­tion (TTSI­DA) came to a screech­ing halt, as the mo­tor­cade from the Bri­an Lara crick­et acad­e­my in Tarou­ba to the Queen’s Park Sa­van­nah in Port-of-Spain planned for to­day will not take place.

How­ev­er, the as­so­ci­a­tion is al­ready mak­ing plans to get back on track. Last month the or­gan­i­sa­tion an­nounced a mo­tor­cade in con­junc­tion with oth­er trade unions to high­light sev­er­al is­sues fac­ing cit­i­zens.

TTSI­DA’s pres­i­dent Al­lan Fer­gu­son had said the demon­stra­tion was nec­es­sary to bring in­to fo­cus the hard­ships mem­bers of the pub­lic were grap­pling with.

“This ral­ly is about that and so much more, peo­ple who are suf­fer­ing can’t buy food, you get­ting raped, you get­ting killed, you can’t get drugs, a lot of things tak­ing place in this coun­try.”

Dur­ing a press con­fer­ence on Fri­day, Fer­gu­son lament­ed that po­lice ap­proval was not ob­tained for to­day’s ac­tiv­i­ty.

Fer­gu­son said he in­tend­ed to op­er­ate with­in the pa­ra­me­ters of the law and called on cit­i­zens to con­tin­ue ral­ly­ing for change un­til the dri­ve for progress is giv­en the green light.

“All we try­ing to do is bring peo­ple to­geth­er so we can be able to make a change in this coun­try. A lot of peo­ple try al­ready, a lot of peo­ple make the ef­fort and all we say­ing is we would like to make a dif­fer­ence. I will nev­er sur­ren­der, I will nev­er sur­ren­der.”

Move­ment for So­cial Jus­tice po­lit­i­cal leader David Ab­du­lah pledged to work along­side law en­force­ment to en­sure there are no fu­ture hur­dles in the way of their demon­stra­tion.

“Once we sent an­oth­er ap­pli­ca­tion in there would be an­oth­er top-lev­el meet­ing with or­gan­is­ers and the TTPS at the high­est lev­el to work out the arrange­ments for the mo­tor­cade so that it could take place. We un­der­stood from that con­ver­sa­tion that the TTPS is not op­posed to the mo­tor­cade.”

Ab­du­lah main­tained the unions were com­mit­ted to high­light­ing the au­thor­i­ties’ fail­ures in ad­dress­ing the chal­lenges cit­i­zens face on a dai­ly ba­sis.