Sat­narayan Ma­haraj

All of my po­lit­i­cal ar­ti­cles for 2015 have fo­cused on Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar and her Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship Gov­ern­ment's han­dling of the econ­o­my. One cru­cial point which I failed to make pre­vi­ous­ly was that the PP has been en­cour­ag­ing more pri­vate-sec­tor in­vest­ment and pub­lic/pri­vate sec­tor al­liances.

Fur­ther, ev­i­dence of the PP's pru­dent fis­cal man­age­ment is the fact that com­mer­cial banks have been lend­ing with­out im­pos­ing any un­rea­son­able cap and busi­ness­es have been in­vest­ing lo­cal­ly de­spite fluc­tu­a­tions in the glob­al econ­o­my. Our na­tion has wit­nessed a mea­sured and re­fresh­ing ap­proach to gov­er­nance un­der the PP.

Dr Row­ley and the PNM have proven that they hold on to an un­sa­vory an­ti-gov­ern­ment ide­ol­o­gy that is to op­pose any and every­thing put for­ward by the PP Gov­ern­ment. They be­lieve that say­ing no will serve to keep the PNM base sup­port­ers hap­py, the econ­o­my weak, crime lev­els un­abat­ed and that you, the cit­i­zens, will re­ward them for con­tin­u­ing to be against every­thing.An ex­am­ple of this be­hav­iour has been their con­sis­tent re­fusalthe Death Penal­ty Bill and fail­ing to make any al­ter­na­tive pro­pos­als what­so­ev­er.

At this time we must ask our­selves what kind of fu­ture do we want. To weath­er dif­fi­cult eco­nom­ic times, we re­quire a gov­ern­ment that will be pre­pared to work to­geth­er with op­pos­ing po­lit­i­cal par­ties and the peo­ple to ad­vance shared pros­per­i­ty and op­por­tu­ni­ty. The PP has con­sis­tent­ly shown that it is pre­pared to work with every­one in the in­ter­est of build­ing our na­tion.

Dr Row­ley and the PNM had more time in gov­ern­ment than any oth­er po­lit­i­cal par­ty. What did they do apart from build­ing white ele­phants north of the Ca­roni Riv­er? His­to­ry has shown that the PNM has tra­di­tion­al­ly in­dulged in wide­spread and sus­tained cor­rup­tion. That is the PNM way and one of its for­mer min­is­ters, the late Desmond Car­ty con­fid­ed, "All ah we thief."

Re­cent­ly, the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al ob­tained a judg­ment against Row­ley in a defama­tion law suit due to Row­ley's fail­ure to file a de­fence. What struck me were the ut­ter­ances of the PNM PRO and Le­gal Rep­re­sen­ta­tive for Row­ley, Mr Faris Al-Rawi.

Al-Rawi and the le­gal team for Row­ley had failed to file court doc­u­ments in a time­ly man­ner. Their ex­cuse has been that the AG has brought not one but six defama­tion law suits against Row­ley us­ing high-pow­ered le­gal teams. By so do­ing, the AG is seek­ing to de­tract Row­ley from crit­i­cis­ing the PP. These state­ments sim­ply have to be re­peat­ed to see how ridicu­lous they are.

The Rules of Court man­date a claimant seek­ing to bring a claim (in this case the AG) against a de­fen­dant (Row­ley) to first write a pre-ac­tion pro­to­col let­ter. This would have al­lowed Row­ley an op­por­tu­ni­ty (usu­al­ly 28 days) to state his de­fence, if any, or to ad­mit to the claim be­ing made. Clear­ly, the AG was dis­sat­is­fied with Row­ley's re­sponse or lack there­of and ex­er­cised his rights by fil­ing a claim in the High Court.

On be­ing served with these claims, Row­ley would have had 28 days to file his de­fence in the first in­stance and a fur­ther 60 days by agree­ment be­tween the par­ties. There­fore, he and his lawyers would have had a min­i­mum of two months and a pos­si­ble fur­ther four months to file a de­fence. What is as­ton­ish­ing, from the me­dia cov­er­age in­volv­ing these defama­tion mat­ters, is that Row­ley has had to ap­ply for ex­ten­sions of time from the Court in all of his mat­ters.

Pray tell Al-Rawi, if this is in fact the case, why is this so. One can cer­tain­ly ap­pre­ci­ate the pos­si­bil­i­ty of ad­min­is­tra­tive slip-ups by the ju­di­cia­ry where it is con­stant­ly be­ing ha­rassed for ex­ten­sions of time and there does not need to be an in­ves­ti­ga­tion by the Court Reg­is­trar to re­veal this ob­vi­ous re­al­i­ty of life.

One of the claims in­volves state­ments made by Row­ley sur­round­ing the e-mail scan­dal and he will have to de­fend in­ter alia the truth of those state­ments.

It is ob­vi­ous to the rea­son­able-mind­ed per­son why the AG wants to get on with busi­ness since al­le­ga­tions of a con­spir­a­cy by the AG and se­nior min­is­ters to kill a me­dia re­porter con­tin­ues to be a stain on his per­son­al rep­u­ta­tion. Se­nior mem­bers of the PP Gov­ern­ment and their re­spec­tive of­fices are tar­nished by un­sub­stan­ti­at­ed al­le­ga­tions of im­pro­pri­ety.

Row­ley was prompt and vig­or­ous in his calls for the In­tegri­ty Com­mis­sion to in­ves­ti­gate the AG and oth­er se­nior mem­bers of the PP Cab­i­net in­clud­ing the Prime Min­is­ter. Pri­or to these calls, he had qui­et­ly sought au­di­ence with the then Chair­man of the In­tegri­ty Com­mis­sion.

What is there­fore not clear, is why the lais­sez-faire at­ti­tude by Row­ley and his At­tor­neys in de­fend­ing these claims. It would ap­pear that Row­ley is quite con­tent­ed with mak­ing state­ments that could be de­fam­ing peo­ple's char­ac­ters with the po­ten­tial of scor­ing cheap po­lit­i­cal points over them.