Govt allowing ‘poor people to ketch hell’

With the dust still settling from last week’s Local Government election campaign, a former attorney general has reiterated that the problems facing society were not going to be solved by either of the two major political parties. Addressing a forum of the National Committee for the Prevention of Homelessness and the Workers Action Committee at the Tarouba squatting area on Sunday, former Attorney General Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj said that the escalating crime and kidnapping rates coupled with the security of land tenure were being ignored by Government who was allowing “poor people to ketch hell in Trinidad and Tobago.” Maharaj, who is also the lead attorney for the Tarouba squatters in their battle with the NHA over land rights at the area, said that while squatting was “unlawful”, Government had a duty to provide shelter to the less fortunate in society. “The law of the land is that if a squatter squats on land and the Government knows and doesn’t go to Court for possession of the land then it has acquiesced — it has agreed that the person could occupy the land temporarily, and the law is that the Government cannot move and use the remedy of ‘self-help’ with bulldozers, and break down the house,” Maharaj said.

“The law is there to protect the rich, the poor, and the squatters,” he added, and reiterated that if the July 30 High Court ruling went against the squatters, the matter would be taken to the Court of Appeal and, if necessary, all the way to the Privy Council in London. Maharaj also slammed Government’s handling of the spate of kidnappings in the nation, saying that “kidnappers may soon take over the country” as TT had developed the “highest rate of kidnapping” in the Western Hemisphere he identified his own strategy for bringing an end to the kidnapping spree, which was pre-emptive action by the AKS. He warned that if the present trend was allowed to go unchecked, “families, business people and even political parties” would resort to kidnapping as a means of getting rid of opponents. Maharaj declared that a new social transformation movement, from the grassroots up, was needed to change Trinidadian society.