70,000 apply to NHA for houses

Works Minister Colm Imbert yesterday accused Couva South MP Kelvin Ramnath of wanting Government to implement a “bigoted, discriminatory, class-biased” housing policy. He was speaking in the House of Representatives yesterday during the debate on the Housing Development Corporation Bill. Imbert stated that Ramnath spent a lot of time complaining that Government was surrounding wealthy properties with low-cost housing and that these low-cost housing developments were devaluating exclusive residential properties. Imbert said he was surprised that someone who represented the people could think this way.

Imbert said Government was merely building settlements where land was available. He said since all the traditional suburbs of Port-of-Spain were full, Government was moving east and central, “ the new growth pole”. Imbert said 70,000 people had applied to NHA for housing. Earlier Ramnath slammed Government’s policy on housing.  He said when one looked at a lot of the people charged with crimes, they were from the Government housing estates. And Government, with its version of egalitarianism, was attempting to put its housing estates within upperclass communities like Palmiste, he said. “Look at what you did in Tarouba. The people of Gopaul Lands are moving out... driven out by the criminals and kidnappers that you create” he said.

He said he sympathised with families like the Naths and the Roopnarines, who after contributing tremendously to their community, were now “victims of a PNM-created kidnapping class.” Turning to the issue of Caroni Lands, he said, they were still to be divested to former Caroni workers. Ramnath stated that the chairman of the Estate Management and business Development Company Uthara Rao “who enjoys a special status hired a security firm headed by a former Commissioner of Police, which was going from house to house cutting down people’s peas trees and corn trees behind their house on ten feet of land, terrorising people...while John Williams was being allowed to construct a steel structure complete with piling and so on, on lands of Caroni at the corner of the Couva Main Road and the Solomon Hochoy Highway. So this Mr Rao and the EMBDC are a law unto themselves,” he said. Minister in the Ministry of Finance Ken Valley stated that as far as he was aware no one had permission to use any of Caroni’s Lands at this point.