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Address of Mr. Winston Dookeran - St. Augustine | | Election 2010 Campaign Speech | | Author: | | Date: 2010-05-12 08:05:18 |
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My people of St.Augustine, I have waited for this day for two and a half years now. At the last election in November 2007 I was defeated as the candidate in this constituency - the victor was Vasant Bharath. Today I stand with him hand-in-hand to convert that defeat into victory for the people of Trinidad and Tobago. It is a victory that we have been waiting on for a long time. It is a victory for our young in our society. It is a victory for those who have stood the test of idealism over the corruption in our society - not only a corruption of money but a corruption of values. The Congress of The People was founded on the principles of high ideals and the young people have kept it alive for the last two and a half years and I want to pay tribute to that idealism.
I know the day will come when the young can dream again that our nation can return to a situation where we can feel proud to be citizens of this land. Our young people will feel proud that whether we are of African, Indian, Chinese, Middle Eastern, European, or Carib heritage in Trinidad and Tobago from now on you shall be equal.
That is a foundational principle upon which we embark on this political journey. At that time I said, let us get the politics right. I soon realized that getting the politics right was not enough, so I went on to build relationships with the communities. A grand consensus which was shared by Prakash Ramadar, our deputy political leader, in San Fernando brought the labour unions together with us. Errol McLeod himself was there.
Then we went into Port of Spain and we embraced the hidden promise of the National Joint Action Committee and we said we shall bring the communities together. We went throughout this country, all over this nation, bringing the communities together so that getting the politics right will now be supported by getting the communities right.
But we soon realized that that too wasn't enough, and when Mr. Manning gave us this sudden gift, and he said he was thinking about a snap election since last October - imagine that, he even used the word snap election - but he gave us a great gift and we are not going to throw it away because the young people depend on us to hold on to that gift and to start a new road in the history of Trinidad and Tobago.
So I said, if there is a snap election, we will have a snap response, and we forged together the People's Partnership which shall be the next government of Trinidad and Tobago. And this is how we shall get the country right, so we have moved in our journey from getting the politics right to getting the country right.
We learned in that journey and we continue to learn our mission has remained the same our ideals have never faltered, our passion for our land has never at any time been questioned. But we change as we move along from getting the politics right, to getting the communities right, to today getting the country right.
And now, ten days or so before the election, we have to do one more thing. We have to get the government right. That's the next responsibility of ours. And that is what I have already begun to be engaged in because I know that the victory will come out of the defeat of the past, and out of that defeat comes the victory of the people, but to make sure that that victory is used for your benefit, half of my time now is being spent on getting the government right so that on May 25th you shall have a stable, solid government ready to work for you, and the government shall now be working for you, rather than you the people be called upon to work to keep a government in place.
We have started that work on many fronts. But I just want to assure you that on the economic front we have started on the right track. In anticipation of what we will face on May the 25th, we commissioned a group of top economists, headed by Professor Patrick Watson, Professor of Applied Economics at the University, to give us a state of affairs as to where this country's finances are. I gave them ten days to produce this report and I am pleased to tell you that they produced this report within the ten days and they gave it to us, the Economic Monetary Unit, a report on the state of the economy. I don't think that even the Prime Minister has leveled with the people on the state of the economy.
I will not use this late hour to go through the details, but to let you know that this is available on our website. But that is not all. We know that there is going to be a fiscal problem, we know that there is an emerging debt problem, we know that the Trinidad and Tobago dollar is under severe pressure and could collapse, we know that the competitiveness of the economy is going downwards, we know all that and we know much more, so we now have to gear ourselves to take on the job.
You know, in 1986, my good friend, Dr. Emmanuel Hosein and myself were in the Cabinet that had to take this country from Squander-mania and the lost of opportunities and bring it back together. I thank Dr. Emmanuel Hosein. For being on this platform again with us tonight, a good friend of mine who has always been a good friend of mine. But he knew what I and others had to do to put country back. I never thought that I'd have to do it again within 20 years in Trinidad and Tobago but if I have to do it I shall do it and I shall work with others to make sure it happens, but this time around we must get the politics right so that they cannot defeat the efforts that we shall make.
There is a big job ahead of us. We have started the process of finding out what the people think is the solution. So we have invited three groups to discuss with us this report on the state of the economy - the business sector, including the Chamber of Commerce and the South Chamber of Commerce, the labour sector and the civil society sector. And we are going to say this is the state of the economy by professional economists. I should let you know other members of the team were Mrs. Mary King, a well know economist in our country and commentator, Indira Sajewan-Ali, another economist and David Walker, an accountant. And we have added to that team, and I want to thank him publicly for so doing the former finance spokesman of the UNC, Mr. Vasant Bharath who shall be joining that team, along with another representative yet to be named from the labour sector.
And tomorrow we shall be meeting with the business community. And we shall discuss with them how we move forward. We have some ideas, but we are going to share with them, and we are going to get their ideas because we are now about to develop the recovery plan. We are now about to develop the economic renaissance that Trinidad and Tobago needs. And then we will meet with the other groups.
So while Mr. Manning politicking, while Mr. Rowley is saying that this is not the time to throw the captain off board, meaning that the time to throw him is not in an election time, it will have to be after the elections, my friends while they are fighting between themselves - whether they will fight before the election or after the election - we have started to build Trinidad and Tobago for the future.
And you know me, I don't take on any job that I do not do, and when I decide to take on a job I do not stop until that job is over. That is why I stand here against all vilification, and I always ask myself in my silent moments why are they vilifying me in this nation? Why are my opponents from past and present saying that I am weak and I have no character and my integrity is at stake. I don't have to respond to those things but I ask myself why am I being vilified by my political opponents for my strengths rather than for my weaknesses. You know why? I say to those, they don't even understand the system in which they are operating. The system of politics in this country has been corrupt and cannot change unless you infuse it with a new economic set of thinking, with a new set of moral values, and a new set of programs for the future. The country is in a state of total corruption. I'm sure you heard Vernon De Lima, and he has been the champion to open the doors to a new righteousness of this country. It is Vernon De Lima and Timothy Hamelsmith, two ordinary lawyers of the COP and now of the People's Partnership, who got up and opened the door to expose the hidden agenda of Mr. Manning and the Calder Hart issue, and that is what prompted this election here today.
I pay tribute to them for doing the work that is necessary and even when we did it they started to say it was not authentic. The ground work that we did was so solid and rigorous, that they could jump in fury and in song and say that it was not authentic and for a good while they didn't want to admit that Vernon and Timothy had gotten the facts to open up the Pandora's box of Mr. Calder Hart and all that he has plundered in this country under the protection of Patrick Manning.
That is the kind of caliber of character that we have, and that is the kind of caliber of men who have come together and are now joining the People's Partnership as we get the country right. And that is what will make Trinidad and Tobago a place that you can be proud of.
So I am not worried about the vilification, I now invited them to continue the vilification, because I have learned from my history, anyone who tries to vilify me ends up in the political cemetery on their own.
What I am worried about is to create the confidence in the country and the international community that Trinidad and Tobago is once again a truly democratic society, is once again embracing the ideas of progress. I was in India not too long ago. Incidentally, I went to 5 universities to lecture and two of them offered me a job to come back and teach at those universities, and I told them it depended on what happened in the politics, I didn't even know there was going to be an election.
But what was more important is that they took me to a place they called the business incubator. It was promoted by the government where they were training young people, and that's why I'm talking to the young people here today, to go through the process of becoming business people. But it is an incubator - you are not learning from the books; you are learning from the real world. How to bring together an idea, how to bring technology, small things. We were supposed to do that with the YTEPP program. I was the Minister of Planning when we created the YTEPP program, and it was supposed to be converted into business incubator so all the young people would move from training into action and would enter the business world and we would satisfy all of the inner desires of the people across the East-West Corridor and South and Central Trinidad.
But it never became an incubator, because once the PNM got in there, they took it over and they made it into a place in which they can provide political bribery to the people. And it has never moved beyond the YTEPP program. That was in the 1980s and other countries like India adopted that and today the progress of India has grown because the small business sector is growing, because there are new entrants in the small business sector and those who are coming into the small business sector are being prepared to play a role because the only way you can build and develop a country is by the people themselves.
But what this government has done is abandon the YTEPP program in terms of its objective and now they are using it to say, 'If you get in here, vote for me'. That is the absurdity in which our politics has reached. But the entrance into the criminal industry is growing, and the entrance into the business sector is falling. How do you expect a country to progress?
There is a study done and I believe it was brought to my attention by Mr. Jamie Bahadur, the Chairman of the St. Augustine constituency who has links with the university, which showed that in the school system there are 20 schools that have a great propensity to supply people into the criminal industry. Government knows of that, they have the information, they know what to do, they have the knowledge available to them they have the power within their hands, but they believe that the pursuit of power for its own sake and the people work to keep them in power. And I ask all those who have been called to work to keep them in power - think deep, go into your hearts, go into your mind, go into your children's future and say to them 'Am I going to keep this government in power, work for them, or am I going to put a government in power who can work for you?'
My friends, that is the issue before us and I make my appeal to all citizens of this country, that this is a defining moment. In the same way that 1990 was a defining moment in the history of this country, 2010 shall be a defining moment. For it might be a moment in which we choose not to change, it might be a moment in which we choose to accept bad governance as our lot, it might be a moment where we accept suffering of the people as a norm, it might be a moment in which we might say 'Those who die, let them die; life means nothing to us'.
Today I had to visit one of our supporters who was wounded in attending a COP meeting in Arima last night. I once again want to deplore all acts of violence whether it happens to us or anyone else, we must not allow the powers that be to use any form of violence to stall the will of the people that is about to be expressed on May 24th. Lets us be peaceful, let us not be not provoked, let us always condemn them, because the idealism of the youth upon which we are based will not allow that. But I was about to say we can make that choice or we can make the other choice to put a new government in place with the prospect of changing all that.
And I use the word prospect deliberately because I don't want you to believe that putting a new government in place will solve problems. What it will do is give you a chance at a fresh start, and then it is up to those who form that government to honour the peoples' wishes and respect the mandate that they get. I will be the first one inside the government to tell the government that they must honour the mandate of the people, and let us build a clean government in Trinidad and Tobago, let us build a government that is based on the dignity of the individuals, let us build a government that will give the poor people a better chance, and let us provide a government that can deliver the basic needs to our people.
So we will see how it works, but the prospect of having that the choice is very clear and I'm making a special appeal to all those who still believe that the Manning regime has something to offer, think inside, don't let, at all, yourselves to be trapped where they are now accepting defeat as a basis for living. We cannot as a society accept defeat and vote back a government that has defeated us. We must convert that defeat into victory, and that is why I come back here in Helping Hands Ground as you are my own hometown where my political life was born not too long ago, to ask you let us convert the defeat that the has PNM imposed on this country into a victory for all of us and all our children and our young people in the years ahead.
Thank you very much.
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