Yetming hits out at Hazel, Rowley

As he piloted his motion on discrimination, UNC MP Gerald Yetming not only took Education Minister Hazel Manning to task but clinically tore apart the case put forward by Dr Keith Rowley justifying a policy to target Afro-Trinidadian males for recruitment at COSTAATT.

Rowley, known for his intellectual and political prowess, was uncharacteristically subdued as Yetming criticised his Budget contribution, which Yetming stated “did nothing to help us have a better understanding of the supposed ‘error’ (in the Social Policy document).” The St Joseph MP verbally rapped Hazel Manning on the knuckles for not coming to the defence of teachers under her charge against Selwyn Cudjoe’s “nonsense” allegation that East Indian teachers were not teaching African children. It was TTUTA’s  Trevor Oliver who came to the rescue of East Indian teachers, and not, Yetming satirised, “the numero uno in education” (Manning). This, he claimed, was proof of the cosy relationship between Cudjoe, a director of the Central Bank and the Government.

But it was on the COSTTATT issue that Yetming focused in the bulk of his contribution. He said he agreed with Rowley’s assertion that Government had a responsibility to identify special problems in the society and address them. He also endorsed Rowley’s claim that the differently- abled, fishermen, single mothers and farmers,  represented such special groups. But, pointing out that “not one of those special problems had a race basis,” Yetming stated: “If you identify teenage pregnancies as a special problem and you say that you want to develop a special programme to deal with that and perchance 99 percent of teenage pregnancies was of one ethnic group, so be it. Nobody in the country would argue with that fact. Nobody would see that as racism.” And the same applied to programmes aimed at alleviating the plight of single mothers, fishermen or farmers, he said. “But why in identifying this problem (of underachievement) you needed to go down this route (of race)?” he asked. Rowley, whose position on the issue, has been repudiated by his leader,  Prime Minister Patrick Manning, studiously avoided any engagement on the issue, writing and reading documents as Yetming spoke.

Noting that Diego Martin West MP in his Budget contribution had identified as a problem under-performing Afro-Trinidadian males, Yetming went further and asked: “Why couldn’t you say that your concern as a Government is with under-performing students at primary, secondary and tertiary level? And, if perchance 80 percent is Afro-Trinidadian, then nobody would have a concern, or see it as racism...If you want to lift under-performing youth, you lift all. But the way you put it, (it is as though) you are intending by way of policy to uplift the Afro-Trinidadian male and not the others,” Yetming reckoned. The UNC frontliner stated that it could not have been a mere coincidence that two months after Cudjoe started making noises about the ethnic imbalance at UWI and the Trinidad and Tobago Institute of Technology and calling for new admission criteria for those institutions, Government should have formulated a document policy with a bias towards Afro-Trinidadian males. And, Yetming said, he still didn’t believe that a technocrat would take it upon himself to write such a policy statement in a Government policy document without the approval of the Minister. “I don’t buy that,” he stated, with table-thumping support from his colleagues. Noting that there was “severe mistrust” in the society, Yetming said at no time did people feel discriminated against as they do now and at no time was the divide so wide and tensions so high as at present.