Kamla: UNC not supporting Kidnapping Bill

Siparia MP Kamla Persad-Bissessar announced that the Opposition will abstain and not support the government which requires a special majority in Parliament to pass the Kidnapping Bill 2003 which penalises anyone involved in negotiating kidnap ransoms with up to 25 years imprisonment.

She was speaking in the House of Representatives on Friday evening during debate on the Rent Restriction Bill. This stance was taken, she said, in reply to Prime Minister Patrick Manning’s recent comment on the Opposition walkout from the House that the Opposition was irrelevant to Parliament. Persad-Bissessar stormed: “He will have to eat his words...We cannot sit here as responsible MPs and co-operate with a government that considers the whole of South and Central Trinidad to be irrelevant...We will abstain on this bill”. Turning to Minister of Agriculture John Rahael who was chased from a meeting in Couva the day before, she warned him: “If he got the ‘smoke’ yesterday, the ‘fire’ is coming”.

Noting that not a single bill on the parliamentary order paper could be passed without the support of the Opposition, she vowed there would be no co-operation with the government until it addressed the workers of Caroni (1975) Limited who were threatened with redundancy. She criticised the government for debating the Rent Restriction Act, a matter dating from 1933, while ignoring the more pressing issues of Caroni (1975) Limited and the government’s proposal to relocate Parliament from the Red House. This was a theme taken up by her colleague Princes Town MP Subhas Panday who declared of the Rent Bill: “There is nobody who could benefit from the act before Parliament today”. Panday said previous PNM governments over time had successively eroded the number of dwelling houses which the act would encompass. He added, the act took away the rights of someone who may have inherited a small old house, to try to make a living from renting it out.