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Address by Mr. Winston Dookeran - Diego Martin | | Election 2010 Campaign Speech | | Author: | | Date: 2010-05-20 15:05:30 |
| There is no doubt that Diego Martin is on the verge of a great victory. Your presence here is in the thousands, and I am told by Rolf that it is a wholly Diego Martin crowd. I want you to understand that for the next four days we must remain cool. We must remain cool because we are about to cross the final hurdle in the creation of a new Trinidad and Tobago. We must walk that bridge in coolness and in calmness. Whatever provocation may come your way, just be cool, just be cool. By being cool you will defeat everything ahead of you. I see in the audience a few people who I must recognise because I think we are coming to the end of what will turn out to be a major campaign in our country. I see Lisa in the audience, as well as Kathryn, Annie and Renata, who have been working from the Flagship House selflessly and I want to thank them for all the work that they have done. Each time I come to a Congress of the People National Meeting I feel that sense of accomplishment on the way the meeting is organized, the way the platform is set up, and the way the entire procedure is put into place. There are many people in the background, who have worked to make us where we are today and I want to pay a special tribute to the team that puts these meetings together physically and logistically: Sarwan Ragbir, Lisa Mohammed, Chris, Ramesh, Primal, Angie Benjamin, Nadia Mohammed and Kenny. Thank you very much for the work that you have been doing.
My friends, you will remember that in 2007 we, in the Congress of the People, in a major task to awaken our people to the possibilities ahead, went throughout this country in search of a new paradigm for politics. At that time I used to quote a very imminent Nigerian writer, Chinua Achebe, who is internationally known and wrote a book, the title of which is 'Things Fall Apart'. The centre cannot hold. He was speaking about Nigerian society at the time which had lost its pride; he was speaking about the Nigerian nation where corruption was the order of the day; he was speaking about the Nigerian leadership which had lost its values for good governance and that led him to write what turned out to be a major book that the whole world looked at. Thousands and thousands of copies were sold. Chinua Achebe! He could well be writing about our own country today. And when I saw that the roof of the President's house had collapsed I know that things have fallen apart in Trinidad and Tobago and the centre has indeed collapsed. That is where we are and in 2010 the journey that we began has now come to a point that we must move beyond the protest, we must move beyond the blame game, we must move beyond the complaining game. We must now start the process of re-building Trinidad and Tobago. So let this meeting here in Diego Martin be the first meeting of the new Government of the People's Partnership in Trinidad and Tobago. You have heard from our previous speakers some of whom I heard and some of whom I was not here on time to hear, but I want to say to our candidates - Verna St Rose Greaves, Garvin Nicholas, Kwasi Mutema, Rocky Garcia, Nicole Dyer-Griffith, that once again we have produced first class candidates in the election and future parliamentarians whom you can trust and I compliment them all for offering themselves for public service because if we want to start the business of government we must start by electing a parliament. A parliament which will be filled with new ideas, a parliament which will be imbued with a sense of loyalty for our nation, a parliament in which the only goal of our people will be to have a new sense of patriotism and I have no doubt, that those candidates who are here and the others who have been chosen for the People's Partnership, is a new generation of political leaders who will take us into the new era of politics in Trinidad and Tobago.
So my friends, I want to very briefly go through two of the major challenges that we shall be facing. We have already produced what everyone has now proclaimed to be the better of the two manifestos before us. It is called, 'Prosperity For All' and it is the manifesto of the People's Partnership for a united people to achieve sustainable development. My friends, we have done more work than that. I have already sent to the new Prime Minister a copy of the governance structure that we must put in place to implement this manifesto and to honour the pledges of the People's Partnership to the people of Trinidad and Tobago. But I want to talk a little bit on the issue of the environment today because I believe we have spoken about the economy, we have spoken about the issues facing the nation in terms of health and education but an issue we have not yet raised is the issue of the environment at the public forum. Sustainable development really is based on having an environmental plan. In the 21st century as we embark on building the pillars for our new society and for our people we must put a lot of emphasis on the issue of environmental sustainable development. There are a large number of proposals that have been put into our manifesto which will inform us as we start the process of government and I just want to outline two of them for you here today, for the benefit of those who are listening to us. Among the many innovative proposals is a proposal we shall in fact take the necessary steps to establish a vibrant recycling industry in Trinidad and Tobago. And in so doing, we have been able to create space for new jobs and able to create opportunities for new entrepreneurship and to do that we will immediately lay before the Parliament what has come to be called, The Beverage Container Bill already prepared by the EMA to set the framework for a creation of a recycling industry in Trinidad and Tobago.
The other proposal that I want to outline to you is dealing with the very difficult issue of sewerage disposal and clean water. In my own constituency in Tunapuna I visited what is called Poolside 1 and Poolside 2; it is part of the Ocono area of my constituency and there was a sewerage plant that was laid there for the last 20 years and the residents in the area have been trying to seek the authority's support to deal with the scent that emits from that plant and they showed me all the letters and they cannot get a single member of the government or any authority to heed their requests. It is a whole file and I said to them, why didn't you take it to your member of Parliament. They told me that she is one of the residents who is suffering from this as well. So my friends, that is one of the examples of what our country is facing. Sewerage disposal and clean water are elementary requirements for a modern, civilized society. And we must now embark throughout this country to set the hygiene right, to create an environment for good health to be able to in so doing to allow our children to grow up with all the necessary protection that they require. So in our manifesto we have included what I call an Action Plan for Sewerage Treatment and Clean Water for all. And to do that, to show you how prepared we are, we shall introduce an Air Pollution Rules and a Solid Waste Disposal Rules to be laid in Parliament to assist the authorities to enforce the issue of sewerage treatment and clean water in Trinidad and Tobago. I am telling you this because I want to tell you that I know on Tuesday, May 25th this country will be calling on us to act. The expectations are high, the discontent has been widespread and I, with my colleagues are prepared to act immediately upon being sworn in to be the new government of Trinidad and Tobago so that we do not disappoint our people. There are many other proposals but I think it is important for us to put the facts as they are.
I was astonished when I read an advertisement in the newspaper today from the People's National Movement talking about our own position and this is what it says, "UNC intention of discontinuing CDAP, UTT, GATE, HYPE, MUST, HDC housing and a host of social programmes has been enunciated in our programmes." I want to tell you that there is no such thing about getting rid of CDAP, there is no such thing about getting rid of UTT, there is no such thing about getting rid of GATE, or HYPE, or MUST or HDC housing but there is one thing that we intend to get rid of and that is Patrick Manning on May 24th!
Another issue is our foreign policy. We must let our foreign policy work for us. Climate change is a major international development. In fact, the Summit that was held here turned out to be a Summit for Climate Change and in that proposal there were a number of ideas as to how the world can grapple with that problem. If we were to look down the road, we have to anticipate, you see we shall not be a government that will only talk about things today for today; we will look ahead and see what are the problems and take action. There is a proposal based on the Copenhagen Summit for the establishment of a global fund under the auspices of the United Nations. What we intend to do is to immediately put our diplomats to work and we will ask them to do two things: To table a resolution at the next UN General Assembly where climate change will again be on the very top of the agenda and call on the United Nations to allow small island states like us to have a special window in accessing the Green Fund that is now going to be put into place. My friends, I am telling you this because we are about to mobilize the resources of the world wherever we can. One thing we know for sure is that we shall at all times use our foreign policy to serve the interests of the people. This is just a little bit of the future as a plan for business.
But what is the situation today. I said that perhaps this country has found that its centre has collapsed. I want to read to you one paragraph of a commentary by the eminent political scientist, Dr Selwyn Ryan last week and this is what he said among other things, "I am also saying that leadership competence has deteriorated significantly over time and that it is time for a change of government. . What we are witnessing is a near total collapse of our governance system in general and many of our key institutions in particular. Our criminal justice system has virtually collapsed as has our public sector procurement system... The government seems clueless as to what to do and takes refuge in bluff and arrogance. Cynicism, anomie, and executive hubris have also become pervasive." My friends that were Selwyn Ryan and Selwyn Ryan said that, over the last ten years, either implicitly or explicitly on all but two occasions he supported the PNM and now he has come out in totality and said it is now the time for the People's Partnership in Trinidad and Tobago. But the reason he has said that is because the nation is about to collapse. We are at risk and we are on the verge of a situation and we have to take control of. We have to hold. And that is why the People's Partnership really was the emergence of what is happening internationally. The search for a new model for political representation. The old system that has been in existence is no longer serving most of the countries of the world, even the United Kingdom recently embarked on a programme for coalition politics and I was personally very happy and I am sure all my COP friends and colleagues were very happy when the new Prime Minister of Britain in his opening statements said that this was a beginning of New Politics in the United Kingdom. So my friends, those of you who were for so many years fighting to keep alive the light of New Politics you have seen now validation of that globally and you will see the actualization of that next week in Trinidad and Tobago. So it has not been in vain. You must be credited and I want to tell all my colleagues who for the last 2 ½ years came to me and said, boy you think we can go through this for five years? It takes a lot of effort to keep a party alive and its ideas and its ideology when you have no parliamentary presence. And people have said to me continually, Will it work? And I wondered at times whether we could have gone through this road for five years, we went through it for three years and we were keeping the light of the New Politics and getting the politics right but then Mr Manning did us a great favour. He said that he wanted, in fact, he indicated that he will call a snap election and when he called a snap election it gave us the opportunity to mobilize all the people in Trinidad and Tobago as we have never been mobilized before ,in a new united movement to bring about the solutions and to bring back this country from the state of collapse and therefore he has now given us permanent light for the future and to give our country a chance to breathe again. I know he has said the PNM will win alone and will lose alone and that is the only time he made the right statement because we know that the PNM this time will lose alone in this election.
So my friends, what is at stake politically? I said that we are part of an international movement, not only the United Kingdom but in other parts of the world and that international movement in the same way that we had a decolonization movement in the 1950s, which led to independence in the same way we have a global phenomenon of the search for new models of political behaviour. And the essential point here is that those who believe that the New Politics must be a politics of inclusion, it must be a politics of bringing people together, it must be a politics that will energise the people in one common front and that is what the People's Partnership has become. Because it is the politics of inclusion. And what Mr Manning is offering to this nation is a politics of exclusion, a politics that is now obsolete in Trinidad and Tobago, a politics that has had its lifetime and he himself has already had two terms in office and he cannot expect this country to go a third term and go down the road with him. We are not going to go down the road with Mr Manning anymore, we are going to go up the road with the People's Partnership. Well, my friends, I know it is late and I know you have heard a lot but I wanted to tell you that we must shift gear, we must shift gear now in order to build the pillars for the new society. I have always said and I have been saying it often on the platform. I am not here to bury Mr Manning, he did that for himself. What I am here to do is to put the pillars for the building of a new society in Trinidad and Tobago and that is why you are here today. And that is why we must not take lightly the view that this partnership does not only bring together the freedom movement of the 1970s through the NJAC movement; the Social Justice Movement that has been there for a long time in the labour movement and today under the Movement for Social Justice; The Tobago Organization of the People in search of a new autonomy and new governance; the United National Congress that has been the backbone of the democracy of Trinidad and Tobago and I salute them for joining in this Movement and being the anchor upon which it is now being based and also of course the party to which I belong and to which many of you belong is the party of The Congress of the People who have been fighting for good governance and unification in Trinidad and Tobago. I do not take lightly what Anil Roberts said when he said that the door is open to the members of the PNM to join in at this time in the history of this country so that we together put back this country on track. We can together prevent us from falling into the precipice that the collapse has created. We can together start again. Start again to bring back stability in Trinidad and Tobago. Start again to solve our crime problem, start again to deal with the issues that affect governance and that requires us to introduce a new idea of transparency in our government. This election was brought about because of the events of what has been called the Calder Hart issue. When Timothy Hamel Smith and Vernon de Lima and others sought to get information that was not available to the Uff Commission of Inquiry, was not available to the Attorney General after they had made a number of enquiries in the matter and laid the information to the country, that precipitated a heightening of fear in the people and in the government and they did not want to account to the people, and therefore they called an election instead. So my friends, that started the process. Exposure, transparency - the way you build a society and gain trust among the people is to facilitate transparency and we owe a debt of gratitude to Vernon de Lima and Timothy Hamel Smith for the work they did in opening up these possibilities in Trinidad and Tobago.
A report that was given to me recently about the National Infrastructure Development Company of Trinidad and Tobago revealed to me that there is no control, there is no accountability, there is nothing in that organization. I would not go through it here with you but I will make it available. What is really happening. The so called Special Interest Companies as they are called, like the National Infrastructure Development Company ,has no regulatory system, and in our proposal we have said that existing companies must not train specifically to accommodate state owned corporate entities and we must now set up a separate body to control and regulate these companies. That is where a lot of the leakages take place. That is where a lot of the so called corruption takes place and what has happened in UDECOTT has now translated itself in the political platform of the PNM where the leader on one hand saying one thing and his deputy saying something else. It is an uncomfortable situation for them to get together to call on his people to vote for the PNM. So my friends, they are involved in shadow boxing and people see through shadow boxing. Every day there are utterances coming from those gentlemen to prove to the country that now is the time for new leadership in Trinidad and Tobago. So let us therefore move forward from today onwards, taking on the issues of transparency. Today's newspaper I saw an article talking about the broadcast by the Prime Minister. Victor Hart, Chairman of Trinidad and Tobago Transparency Institute has raised concerns about the Prime Minister, Patrick Manning that he was using televised addresses to the nation to represent his political interests for next week's general election.
My friends, we must get the government to work for the people and that is why we must now get rid of the government as it wants you to keep them in power and we must put in place a government that will work for the people instead. I make the call to all those in the PNM to join with us, come at this crucial moment in the history of Trinidad and Tobago as we must forward to build a new society, set the pillars for that and we will be able to breathe fresh air in Trinidad and Tobago. Thank you so much. Are you ready for the new job of building this nation? Are you ready to take this nation forward? Are you ready for the new leadership that we must embark upon? My friends, I know you are ready and let us get on with the job of building a new Trinidad and Tobago.
Thank you very much.
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