Rowley: Panday inciting violence

HOUSING MINISTER Dr Keith Rowley condemned Opposition Leader Basdeo Panday for attempting to incite violence within the national community, and charged that no government in Trinidad and Tobago undermined democracy like the UNC during its six years in power. Speaking during the Budget debate in the House of Representatives yesterday, Dr Rowley said, “I rarely agree with the Leader of the Opposition when he says that the messenger has to have some credibility if the message is to be believed. “I think there is merit in that statement because if that is true, a lot of what the Leader of the Opposition tried to put across as a message today would not be believed by anybody. Clearly the person who wrote that speech was unaware of the history of our country and the history of the government that was led by the member for Couva North.”

Rowley reminded MPs that in 2000, the UNC “got people rejected at the polls and brought them into the Cabinet as ministers of Government to vote against people who were elected into the Parliament.” He said it was one of those individuals who occupied the Speaker’s Chair and had him (Rowley) suspended from Parliament. “For two months, the people of Diego Martin West had no voice in this Parliament because a defeated candidate sat in that chair and called for a motion to put me out of the House because I spoke about corruption in the airport. I had to sit here today and listen to my friend from Couva North come here and lecture me about undermining democracy,” he stated. Rowley said the UNC Cabinet of 1996 kept the Budget debate in Parliament non-stop for 24 hours so the population would never hear the Opposition’s contributions and launched repeated attacks against both the presidency and judiciary during the period 2000 to 2001. “If that was not undermining our democracy, then I don’t know what is,” he added.

Rowley slammed Panday for continuing to shed crocodile tears about Caroni (1975) Ltd’s restructuring, while simultaneously renewing his verbal attacks against Minister in the Ministry of Finance, Christine Sahadeo. “He is sending all kinds of coded messages to the East Indian community invoking all kinds of sinister plots and talking about our diversity being a tragic liability because he wants to see out of that diversity, mayhem and as he said, bloodshed. “The PNM’s actions in treating with the sugar industry now, according to him, will cause that. For six years (in government) he did absolutely nothing (about Caroni) and allowed the sugar industry to come to a point where it has to be constricted in a way that it is constricted now. He is trying to cast aspersions on people in the context to send a message that the actions of the Government of Trinidad and Tobago are somehow racially motivated. I reject that out of hand,” Rowley declared to thunderous desk-thumping from PNM MPs. The minister added that, “The worst descriptions of any action in TT coming from the Inter-American Development Bank ranged in the period 1996 to 2001.”