TANCOO: Hinds on games
Oropouche West MP speaking at a Corner meeting today slammed National Security Minister Fitzgerald Hinds for playing games with the lives and livelihoods of citizens.
Referring to a daily newspaper report Tancoo said “Hinds boasted about having substantial details about the identity of persons who incited others to riot, to engage in violence which included throwing of glass bottles at police and media, to engage in the destruction of public property, which occurred in and around Port of Spain last Monday.
Members of the public were stranded in massive traffic jams along the main access roads to and from Port of Spain. Business owners lost millions, the travelling public found themselves delayed into the night as taxis and buses were unavailable. Substantial state resources which should have been clearing water courses currently unmaintained by this government had to be diverted to remove rubble, burning tires etc. In the middle of a crime pandemic in Trinidad and Tobago a large number of police and other security personnel and equipment had to be diverted from protecting citizens exposed to unending robberies, rapes and murders. The cost to taxpayers of this single day of protest was substantial.
Yet instead of taking action to address the cause of the protest that took place in his own constituency, Minister Hinds engages in “rah rah” talk making wild and unsubstantiated insinuations and innuendo designed to deflect from his complete and comprehensive failure as Minister of National Security. With all this evidence he claims to have, why has the Minister failed to act on it? If the information is substantial enough to make a public statement on it, why has the Minister failed to do anything about it? Is he misleading the country in that he has no such information and so this is just political games for him? Is he protecting someone and seeking to deflect attention? Or is Hinds just incompetent and sleeping on the job again?
This Minister is on record as saying that it is not his duty to keep citizens safe and secure. While the Minister continues to play games and abdicate from the responsibilities of the job that taxpayers are paying him to do, members of the public and the business community continue to lose thousands of hours of productive work, millions in business activity and hundreds of lives. The fact the Prime Minister continues to endorse Minister Hind’s failures also means the country has lost hope.