Opposition leader Dr Keith Rowley is calling on Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar to commission an immediate status review of the entire Solomon Hochoy Highway extension. He said that during a news conference at his office on Charles Street, Port-of-Spain, yesterday.
Rowley said he met with the Prime Minister on Wednesday afternoon and asked her to use her office to attempt to directly or indirectly intervene in the hunger strike by the leader of the Highway Re-Route Movement, Dr Wayne Kublalsingh. Kublalsingh is in his fourth week of the protest against the construction of the Debe to Mon Desir segment of the $7.5 billion highway extension project from San Fernando to Point Fortin.
He said he told Persad-Bissessar at the meeting: “Within 24 hours we expect that you will act with the humanity your office demands.” He said the Opposition expects the Government will continue to take all appropriate steps to ensure the country is spared the outcome of the current developments.
Rowley said: “If a life is at risk firemen go through fires, risking their own lives to save a life. So a public officer, who is required to intervene in whatever way she chooses to save a life, if a life is at risk, then that should be normal.” He said he agreed the Government must not be seen to be coerced unnecessarily by people with their own agenda but it has a responsibility, especially when it was the root cause of the problem.
He said it was easy to “personalise this and make it a Wayne Kublalsingh (matter), how much is one life worth, and be disparaging about it.” However, he said, “When these things happen, in any society, the nation is on trial, and it is how we deal with it that will determine who we are. T&T is on trial and this Government is on trial, because the Government’s actions are the root causes of this particular problem.”
Rowley said he promised the PM he would not make any public comment for 24 hours as she considered his request, and it was after their meeting that the PM decided to meet the leaders of the Inter-Religious Organisation (IRO). After that meeting the IRO said it would visit Kublalsingh yesterday to encourage him to end his protest, as his life was now at risk after not eating or drinking for almost a month. Rowley was critical of some of the members of the IRO who visited Kublalsingh.
Without calling names, he said, “Some of those persons are not honest brokers and the Government should not choose persons who are not honest brokers to intervene.” He said many of those people have “made comments that were quite insensitive and self-serving. Some of them were even praising the Prime Minister for the action she was taking (not to meet Kublalsingh). Such people are not honest brokers.”
He said the Government had the responsibility to do all it could to prevent the nation’s image from being tarnished, but expected that when the State acts improperly and Kublalsingh continued to act in a manner to lead to his demise, then the people of T&T would be accused of not having gone the extra mile to prevent any unpleasant outcome.
Rowley said the highway status review should be done by competent experts who would present a report within three months and should look at “the beginning, the current status, the challenge ahead and how the Government intends to proceed.” He said the project was the largest undertaken by any government in this country but was “mired in controversy and clouded in significant secrecy.”
The problem, he said, was that the Government in 2011, despite public objections by the Opposition and the HRM, decided to take the project to Debe and Mon Desir, which were “in the backyards of (its) MPs.” Although there was inadequate preparation for the project being constructed through a built-up area and a lagoon, he said, no money was available and no proper technical study was completed. “That was the root cause of this problem.”
He said the same court judgment which said there should be no stopping the project also “pointed to a failure on the part of the Prime Minister to keep commitments that she made, and the judge was not very complimentary in describing such a development from such an officer.” Rowley said there was no law preventing the Government from acting.
In response to a question he said he did not announce his meeting with the PM until afterwards because he wanted her to act “in the quiet of her study before any public information was made known, so that whatever she did would have been seen as a measured response to an appeal which I made to her.”