Chief Sec­re­tary of the To­ba­go House As­sem­bly (THA) Orville Lon­don is urg­ing all mem­bers of the To­ba­go Or­gan­i­sa­tion of the Peo­ple (TOP) to en­sure they do not con­tin­ue to mis­lead the pub­lic of To­ba­go on the amount of mon­ey his ad­min­is­tra­tion spent over the past 12 years.

Fur­ther, he said, he want­ed to re­quest from his op­po­nents they "re­spect the in­tel­li­gence of the peo­ple of To­ba­go and un­der­stand the peo­ple of To­ba­go were liv­ing in To­ba­go; the peo­ple of To­ba­go were see­ing what was hap­pen­ing in To­ba­go; that the peo­ple of To­ba­go have ex­pe­ri­enced what has been hap­pen­ing in To­ba­go for the past decade and they recog­nised po­lit­i­cal spin when they saw it.

"It is in­sult­ing to the peo­ple of To­ba­go that the TOP all of whom have lived in To­ba­go for the past 12 years should now be talk­ing about noth­ing is hap­pen­ing when all these things have been go­ing on around them for so long," Lon­don said dur­ing Wednes­day's week­ly post Ex­ec­u­tive Coun­cil me­dia brief­ing .

He said, "If you're deal­ing with an is­sue you first start off with the facts be­cause the in­for­ma­tion on the bud­getary al­lo­ca­tion to To­ba­go and the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly is a mat­ter of sim­ple arith­metic," he said. He added: "All you got to do is to add all the monies that were giv­en to the THA be­tween fis­cal 2002 and fis­cal 2012, add it up and you come up with a fig­ure and the fig­ure is not $20 bil­lion. In fact, they gone to $22 bil­lion."

Lon­don said this mis­lead­ing in­for­ma­tion had been spo­ken of by the TOP and PP mem­bers on their plat­form and in ad­ver­tise­ments for the Jan­u­ary 21 elec­tion cam­paign. He said the fig­ure the As­sem­bly re­ceived up to fis­cal 2012 was $16.39 bil­lion and the first quar­ter re­ceipt for fis­cal 2013 would have brought it up to a lit­tle less than $17 bil­lion and that was why he had been speak­ing of $17 bil­lion.

He said of the $16.39 bil­lion which the As­sem­bly re­ceived up to the end of fis­cal 2012, $13.54 bil­lion of that was for re­cur­rent ex­pen­di­ture and on­ly $2.58 bil­lion was in fact de­vel­op­ment funds. "In oth­er words the THA would have re­ceived an av­er­age of $240 mil­lion per year for de­vel­op­ment," he added.

Lon­don said: "When you take 12 years and ac­cu­mu­late it in that kind of man­ner the num­bers sound big but when you break the num­bers down one would un­der­stand the cir­cum­stances un­der which we op­er­at­ed and the chal­lenges which we had to face be­cause ba­si­cal­ly we would have av­er­aged for de­vel­op­ment, this is, all the ma­jor and not so ma­jor de­vel­op­ment projects in To­ba­go from the prince­ly sum of $240 mil­lion."

Lon­don said the Prime Min­is­ter "comes to To­ba­go and tries to den­i­grate us, but this is a gov­ern­ment that has spent close to $160 bil­lion in three years. And not on­ly that, it does not in­clude all the mon­ey that was bor­rowed; all the bonds that were raised et cetera; so the to­tal amount of mon­ey avail­able to this gov­ern­ment over three years could be close to $200 bil­lion and they have the ef­fron­tery to come to To­ba­go to crit­i­cise us be­cause we can say what we did with our $16 bil­lion or $17 bil­lion.

Lon­don said he al­so want­ed the peo­ple of To­ba­go to un­der­stand that of the $16 bil­lion or $17 bil­lion, $8.8 bil­lion was spent in wages, salaries and ben­e­fits to As­sem­bly em­ploy­ees over the years and that was an in­di­ca­tion of the con­tri­bu­tion the As­sem­bly had made to the qual­i­ty of life of the peo­ple of To­ba­go.

Lon­don cites ben­e­fits

The Chief Sec­re­tary said To­ba­go's ben­e­fits in­clud­ed:

• Road in­fra­struc­ture, the new Fi­nan­cial Com­plex.

• The Buc­coo In­te­grat­ed Fa­cil­i­ty

• Scar­bor­ough Li­brary

• Shaw Park Cul­tur­al Com­plex

• $100mil­lion spent on uni­ver­si­ty schol­ar­ships from which 1,600 peo­ple have ben­e­fit­ted,

• The en­ter­prise as­sis­tance grants in which 400 peo­ple ben­e­fit­ed,

• $23mil­lion for the en­ter­prise as­sis­tance fund from which 230 peo­ple ben­e­fit­ted from loans and grants.

• Malls at Ad­ven­ture, Buc­coo, Calder Hall, Sig­nal Hill and Char­lot­teville at a cost of $40mil­lion.

• Eleven com­mu­ni­ty cen­tres.

• Eight ear­ly child­hood cen­tres.

• $240mil­lion on new hous­es.

• $30.9 mil­lion on home im­prove­ment grants and sub­si­dies.

• Five new health cen­tres.

• Sev­en new fish­ing de­pots and

• im­prove­ment and light­ing of eight recre­ation­al grounds.