HOCHOY DESPERATE, says LONDON

Chief Secretary of the Tobago House of Assembly (THA), Orville London has dismissed Minority Leader Hochoy Charles’ comments on the $1.3 billion THA budget package as those of a “desperate” man.

London claimed that over the years Charles and the past National Alliance for Reconstruction (NAR) regime had only placed Tobago in “a position to fight up,” but that Tobagonians were tired of that. “Tobagonians are tired; they want to now reap the benefits of struggle, they want to reap the benefits of having a leader — The purpose of a leader is not to get his forces to join him in fighting; the purpose of a leader is to fight and struggle and, most of all, win for his people,” he said, during last Thursday’s weekly post-Executive Council Meeting press briefing.

London charged that despite having political control both in Tobago and in Port-of-Spain in their time, the previous NAR regime had failed to deliver to the people of Tobago on every occasion. With reference to Charles’ fixation on the Dispute Resolution Commission’s (DRC) recommendation that Tobago (the THA) should be allocated 4.03 to 6.9 percent of the national budget, London emphasised that Tobago should not be “locked in” to the considerations of the DRC.  He noted that the budget statement specifically said “monies available to the THA is $1.3 billion” — “And that’s what we are interested in; and what we do with that is that to a certain extent we make the DRC irrelevant”, he asserted.  London stressed that once there was ‘‘true” “partnership’’ between the central government and the THA there was no need for the DRC. He noted that to resort to the DRC meant there had to be a ‘‘dispute’’ to be settled by a third party. “All we are saying, (is) if we can do it and get even better without a dispute, then why look for a dispute? We have had 20 years of dispute!” London declared.

“We have had 20 years of dispute, and what have we got?” He lamented the “Hochoy Charles’ kind of economics” and asserted that that era had gone. “He is desperate; I think basically if you are seeing a situation where people are performing not only better than you have, but better than you can hope to perform, then desperation sets in, and I empathise with him,” London told reporters. “That’s why I don’t get annoyed with Mr Charles, you know, I sometimes sympathise with him when I see the level of desperation that exists within the man.”