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Address by Winston Dookeran - Arima | | Election 2010 Campaign Speech | | Author: | | Date: 2010-05-12 09:05:38 |
| My friends and my colleagues, for some time now this country has been blaming the government. For a long time, they have been quarrelling with Mr. Manning and, almost on a daily basis, they have been complaining about bad governance in Trinidad and Tobago.
I want to ask you here tonight in Arima: Let us stop blaming the government. Let us stop quarrelling about Mr. Manning; let us stop complaining about a failed government. Let us simply fire Mr. Manning on May the 24th. That is your charge, that is your responsibility, that is your honour that you have to discharge if we want to save Trinidad and Tobago and start a new page in the politics of this country, and a new hope for our children in the future.
It is up to you, the people who are here, and those who are not here, to understand where we are in our nation today - a small nation of just 1.3 million people, who have had another glorious opportunity to put things right. And Mr. Manning and his government have squandered, for yet another time, such a great opportunity.
I remember in 1986 or thereabouts, when I first entered the politics of this country, we came in after the then government had squandered an opportunity. We put it back in order, things are moving correctly. Mr. Manning came, a lot of oil money flowing. We thought this was another glorious opportunity for him to put the country back in order and, once again, he has squandered it. I wonder, and I feel sorry for myself to have to come and rescue this country for the second time in 25 years.
The stage is set. The opening is now here. Hope is just around the corner. But it didn't happen just like that. Do you remember when we launched the Congress of the People, we said we wanted to get the politics right? We still want to do that and we will still work to make it happen. I pay tribute to our deputy political leader, Wendy Lee Yuen, for sticking to the course over all these hard years.
I realized that getting the politics right was correct but it was not enough. So I began to hold discussions with my colleagues, firstly with the labour union, and we invited Errol McLeod to join us in San Fernando in a grand consensus about two years ago. And then we went into Port of Spain and we teamed up with the National Joint Action Committee. And we said, "To get things right, we must get the communities right. And right here in Arima, we are very fortunate to have a powerful community group that is under the leadership and inspiration of your candidate now, Mr. Rodger Samuel, to join is in getting the community right.
And then I told myself, "Getting the politics right is not enough. Getting the community right is not enough, because what we need to do is to get the country right," and that is why we are here today, on the People's Platform of Partnership for the people of Trinidad and Tobago - to get the country right and that is why we are here.
So my friends, this is not a sudden coming together of the political forces in the country. It has been well designed, in anticipation of the 2012 election. But because Mr. Manning claimed that he wanted to have a snap election - in fact, I heard him say that he had decided to have a snap election since last October. I couldn't believe it. So while he snapping, for the last six months, he has now provided us with a glorious opportunity to come together as one, as we have never done before, as we unite this country as we always wanted to do, and that opportunity we shall not allow him to take away from us, and we shall grasp it with both hands as we move forward.
But now he is backing back, and he is telling the people, "Watch out for this People's Partnership. They going to take away everything. They going to get rid of CEPEP, they going to get rid of UTT, they going to get rid of the GATE programme," and every other thing. I want to tell you here in Arima, and for all those who are listening, that is the furthest thing from the truth. We not interested in getting rid of these institutions like GATE and CEPEP and UTT. In fact, we will strengthen them. One of the things we will do: we will get rid of the corruption in UTT and put it back on the right track to serve the nation's future. And everybody knows how much corruption there is in UTT. But one thing I'll tell you, we intend to get rid of Mr Manning and his government, that's for sure. That we are going to work towards.
I don't know if anybody has realized what will happen if Mr. Manning remains Prime Minister after May 24th. Mr. Rowley has been quoted as saying that a good sailor must not throw the captain off during an election period. Does he mean that after the election he intends to do that? So when you vote for Mr. Manning and Mr. Rowley, you voting for trouble to come in this country, when this country needs stability and progress. Are you prepared now for that fight inside the PNM to continue after this election? Because that is what he said: "Don't throw the captain off during an election." So watch it. After the election, they are going to be consumed with their personal fights. The country is going to suffer, as it has suffered under the UDECOTT issue. Let me take the opportunity here today to acknowledge publicly two gentlemen, one of whom is on the platform here today, who opened the lid of the pandora's box of Calder Hart. The Attorney General claimed that he was investigating it for months. My friends, it turned out that it took two bright lawyers to simply get the legal information from abroad, and in 10 days, we in the Congress of the People released that to the public, and that brought about the fall, and I pay my tribute Timothy Hamel-Smith and Vernon De Lima for the work they have done for Trinidad and Tobago. Thank you, Timothy. Thank you, Vernon.
History will show what an important time it was for us to expose that. In fact, I believe this snap election, which this man was planning since last October, came about because he wanted to use the election to hide what was going to come out of the Calder Hart issue. He thought that, to save Calder, whom he has protected for all these years, he would call a whole election, put the country in turmoil just to save him, so that after the election, he'll say that the people spoke, and if the people spoke, you all forget Calder Hart and this thing. I am telling you: you will speak; you will tell him; you'll not forget it.
You will tell him that this is something we will not tolerate, and after the election, we shall carry on, we shall carry on to clean up this country and put real government in place.
Now we can talk a lot about the future, and on Thursday of this week, we shall be officially launching our manifesto. But we have, over the last week and a half, spoken on many parts of it. I spoke about the economy and I have a report in my hands on the state of the economy. That was done under the leadership of Dr Patrick Watson, Professor of Applied Economics at the University of the West Indies, and a number of other very intelligent economists. We have a Crime plan already in place, and we shall be speaking about it later again. When I leave here, I go to the meeting in Helping Hands Ground to join my colleagues there. Vernon De Lima shall be speaking on that. We also have worked out a health plan and, my friends, that is in place because we understand how the people are suffering for health care. Arima has been one of the victims of that for many years. And what I am told they call a hospital is not a hospital at all. We have to make that right.
So there is a lot of work to be done and tonight I won't go into great detail. Even on our foreign policy, almost everything has to be done. But what I want to tell you is that I know that this country is about to change. It is another major leap in its politics. Once we brought together the partnership that brought the unity across the classes, across the races and across the geography of this land, the dye was cast, and we shall form the next government of Trinidad and Tobago. Then we shall get the country right. Our work will then start.
And in the next 10 days, while I campaign, as I will be doing with my colleagues, let me say here, you have a wonderful candidate in Mr. Rodger Samuel, who has stood the ground. A man of the cloth, a man of sincerity, a man who has committed himself to the service of the people, a man who stands up as a son of the soil of Arima, to put Arima back in the country's history, and not as the Minister said, "A place which is a bush." Or was a bush. Roger Samuel is going to take you to new horizons. Arima has always been the centre of civilisation and unity in Trinidad and Tobago, and he shall make you proud once again, by having this place become the centre of unity, because the government of the People's Partnership will be a government of unification.
Everyone will have a place. Whether your heritage is of African descent or Indian descent or Chinese descent or Carib descent or European descent or Middle Eastern descent, you shall have a permanent place in the politics. And in this country and in this land of ours, I pledge that to you here today. That is what got me into politics, that is what the Congress of the People has based its politics on, and that is why today we can say without fear of contradiction, that is the society we are going to create. So have no fear. There is a place and a shelter for everyone as we create a new political umbrella. But we are doing that to solve the country's problems, to deal with the country's problems, which I spoke to you about. We also have, with adjoining constituencies, some of the best candidates who have emerged. These are children of the Congress of the People, who entered public life only 2 or 3 years ago. What motivated them to join the Congress of the People was a heavy dose of idealism. They could have taken the other course and taken the easy route to political office. But they didn't do that. Dr Lincoln Douglas, a man who lives by his ideals, stands here as your candidate for Lopinot/ Bon Air West, and I say to you, you could not have got a more dedicated loyalist on your front here.
My friends, this is an important time and I hope you shall consider it so. The choice is between voting for known bad governance or the prospect of good governance. The choice is between whether you want to keep the society divided or you want a new page to bring it together. The choice is whether you want to keep complaining and blaming and quarrelling with your government or if you want to honour and say to your government, "Thank you for what you are doing." And we pledge here today to make government work for the people, not to force the people to work to keep a government in office. Because that's the choice - not to force the people to work to keep a government in office. We want to give you a government that will now work for the people. That is the only mandate that we are seeking. And when we stop discharging that mandate, the constitutional order of the day will allow you to have your say. We have to do major political reform in this country.
I don't want to leave you here thinking that this is an easy job, but we know, that our country deserves no less from us, the loyalists, the patriots, the committed, that we offer ourselves to serve this nation, to serve our country, to serve our people. And to do that, we seek your support, your mandate and the mandate of so many thousands of others with whom you have contact. Because we don't have state resources to fight an election, which itself is wrong. We rely on the resources within your hearts, the resources within your minds, the resources in your idealism for our great country. That to me is a stronger resource than all the money that they shall be spending and they are continuing to spend. That will not fool the people of Trinidad and Tobago anymore because the people understand that that has been used in the past.
Let me end by saying that, when I walk through Tunapuna, I see all the roads paved all of a sudden. All over Tunapuna. So I sent a letter to Mr. Manning. I said, "Thank you for doing the job that I will have to do after May the 24th."
Thank you very much. Go out on May 24th. Rally behind Rodger Samuel. Rally behind Lincoln Douglas. Rally behind Anna Maria Mora. Rally behind all the candidates here. When you do that, then the people in Tunapuna will rally behind me, and we shall have an upset victory in this part of the country. And that's going forward.
Thank you very much.
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