Valley: No dashiki or dhoti for me — I’m a ‘new world’ man

Trade Minister Ken Valley is no mook. No dashiki or dhoti for him. Valley stated forthrightly that under no circumstance would he be seen dressed in either a dashiki or dhoti because he was a “new world” man. Saying that he didn’t understand why people wanted to hold on to “some mother country that didn’t want us in the first place,” Valley said it was time to “see ourselves as citizens of Trinidad and Tobago,” not Africans or Indians. He was speaking in the House of Representatives yesterday. As he called on the UNC to stop the “hair-counting”, Valley said: “Mr Speaker, I mean, you know they tell me that on Emancipation Day you going to put on dashiki. And I don’t understand what I putting it on for in the first place. What I putting on? I looking like a mook.” (You) Understand!”

Valley, who gave an emotional and impassioned contribution in the debate on the Police Service Reform, also stated that everybody in Trinidad and Tobago  knew that former President Arthur N R Robinson was going to (give) “wood” (to) the UNC at the first opportunity he got, because of the total disrespect it showed to the office of the President. Valley said Panday had a “real tabanca” of the Presidency because he made a serious miscalculation in the past. He thought because the Electoral College in which his party had a majority, elected former President Robinson, he (Panday) could have told Robinson exactly him what to do, Valley said. But that didn’t materialise, he noted. “And so you have the member for Couva South (Ramnath) still going off “like a mad man last night, telling us about stealing elections.”

“I don’t know how in God’s name they expected the  person who had the discretion at that time (the President) to put them back in government after the way they treated the office of President... Everybody had to know that the first chance the President had he would ‘wood’ you.’ Oooooooh! The UNC Mps cried, and there was an uproar. But Valley was just getting started at giving some ‘wood’ himself. “And every Trinidadian and Tobagonian in that office would have done the same thing. Could you imagine what would have been the position of every Trinidadian, every Tobagonian if, God forbid, the President had put you back in office. Look at what is happening in the courts right now.

Every Monday morning is another one of you before the courts. Every Monday morning!,” he charged, to thunderous table-thumping support. Valley told the UNC MPs they were following a “dead man.” Quoting from a newspaper article in which Panday said he was 70 and dangerous, had already lived his biblical allotment (three score and ten), and therefore people “couldn’t kill me because I dead already,” Valley said: “Understand what he is telling you, ‘I’ve lived my life already, chew you.’ You there sitting down like lamb going to the slaughter,” he said, as his colleagues pounded their desks.