Kali­fa Clyne

Trinidad and To­ba­go is sick and needs heal­ing, says Min­is­ter of Works and In­fra­struc­ture Jack Warn­er. Warn­er was speak­ing of crit­i­cisms that may have been aimed at lo­cal de­sign­er Anya Ay­oung-Chee dur­ing the Project Run­way com­pe­ti­tion. He made the state­ment while brief­ing re­porters af­ter a meet­ing with Port-of-Spain may­or Louis Lee Sing at City Hall yes­ter­day. Com­ment­ing on Ay­oung-Chee's vic­to­ry, Lee Sing had said any suc­cess that T&T na­tion­als en­joyed ul­ti­mate­ly be­came the suc­cess of T&T. He said as a coun­try, peo­ple were more like­ly to pull down oth­ers, par­tic­u­lar­ly if they hap­pened to fal­ter along the way to suc­cess.

"I re­mem­ber Hase­ly Craw­ford cam­paign­ing on his own and when he was fi­nal­ly at the top of his game and he won the gold in the Olympics, it took a long while for the coun­try to recog­nise that he was an achiev­er," Lee Sing said. It was at this time that Warn­er re­peat­ed the com­ment that the "coun­try is sick." Lee Sing con­tin­ued, say­ing that from Craw­ford's sto­ries it could be un­der­stood that it was dif­fi­cult to be an achiev­er in T&T. He com­mend­ed Ay­oung-Chee on her achieve­ment and hoped oth­er na­tion­als would not be de­terred by neg­a­tive com­ments that may go their way as they as­pire to great­ness. Yes­ter­day's meet­ing with Lee Sing was sup­posed to pre­clude a tour of the city by Warn­er, Lee Sing and tech­ni­cians from both the City Cor­po­ra­tion and the Works Min­istry.

Speak­ing to re­porters, Lee Sing said that joint ef­forts by the Works Min­istry and the Port-of-Spain Cor­po­ra­tion had suc­ceed­ed in less­en­ing the ex­tent of wa­ter in the city af­ter heavy rain­fall as com­pared to months ear­li­er when the Princess Eliz­a­beth Home in Wood­brook had been flood­ed out. Af­ter speak­ing to re­porters, both Lee Sing and Warn­er set out for their tour of the city. How­ev­er, af­ter heavy show­ers, and on­ly one stop on Pic­ton Road in East Port-of-Spain, the tour was abort­ed. Even as ve­hi­cles drove along In­de­pen­dence Square large pock­ets of wa­ter could be seen gath­er­ing, flood­ing out side­walks near the Cathe­dral of Im­mac­u­late Con­cep­tion.