Shal­iza Has­sanali

Less than two years af­ter he was elect­ed, con­stituents of San­gre Grande/To­co MP Dr Ru­pert Grif­fith are call­ing on him to go. Un­der the hot sun yes­ter­day, throngs of con­stituents, main­ly women, mount­ed protest ac­tion out­side Grif­fith's con­stituen­cy of­fice in San­gre Grande, call­ing on Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar to in­ter­vene.

The pro­test­ers asked that Grif­fith be re­called as their MP. They claimed he has not been rep­re­sent­ing them. The protest was held un­der the watch­ful eye of po­lice of­fi­cers, while Grif­fith re­mained in­side his of­fice at­tend­ing to con­stituents seat­ed in the lob­by. Armed with plac­ards that read "Please, help us Kam­la," the an­gry pro­test­ers re­peat­ed­ly chant­ed: "Grif­fith must go." They al­so claimed that Grif­fith was as­sist­ing "out­siders" and PNM sup­port­ers.

Al­so dis­trib­uted to mo­torists and pedes­tri­ans were fliers bear­ing a pho­to­graph of Grif­fith that read "To­co/San­gre Grande Worst Dis­ap­point­ment," and pam­phlets. The fliers stat­ed there had been no URP gangs in Damarie Hill, Quash Trace and Pic­ton Road. The pam­phlet out­lined ten is­sues af­fect­ing the con­stituents, among them the fir­ing of a man for ex­pos­ing ghost gangs in San­gre Grande, sup­port­ers not re­ceiv­ing any­thing and an out­sider re­ceiv­ing the first Cepep con­tract in the north-east­ern re­gion.

UNC ac­tivist Cas­sim Ali and spokesman for the pro­test­ers said San­gre Grande was now di­vid­ed and feared that if a gen­er­al elec­tion was called in the morn­ing, the UNC seat would go back to the Peo­ple's Na­tion­al Move­ment. "UNC sup­port­ers are un­hap­py...Jobs have not been forth­com­ing which have the peo­ple dis­en­chant­ed," he said. Ali said con­stituents had no con­fi­dence in Grif­fith. He threat­ened to protest every Tues­day in front of Grif­fith's of­fice if the mat­ter was not ad­dressed by the Prime Min­is­ter.

URP fore­man, Eu­sta­cia Noel, of Quash Trace, said: "Things are re­al­ly chaot­ic. We are the peo­ple who sup­port­ed this Gov­ern­ment...and our MP is re­al­ly not do­ing any­thing for us." Noel claimed all the gangs in her area were tak­en away two months ago. "There is a lot of poor peo­ple in Quash Trace and sin­gle moth­ers who de­pend heav­i­ly on the lit­tle ten days to sur­vive," she said.

"Peo­ple just keep call­ing my phone and ask­ing me what is go­ing on. "I have no an­swers for them...We have reached our boil­ing point." Ef­forts to speak with Grif­fith dur­ing the protest were un­suc­cess­ful.