Shal­iza Has­sanali

To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly (THA) Chief Sec­re­tary Orville Lon­don has ex­pressed con­cerns that Min­is­ter of To­ba­go De­vel­op­ment Del­mon Bak­er was un­der­min­ing the as­sem­bly's au­ton­o­my by "set­ting up a par­al­lel THA."Lon­don was speak­ing yes­ter­day at the PNM's me­dia brief­ing at Bal­isi­er House, Port-of-Spain.Un­der the THA Act, Lon­don said, the THA con­trols cer­tain ar­eas, main­ly cul­ture, sports and com­mu­ni­ty de­vel­op­ment.

He said the min­istry was sup­posed to act as a co-or­di­na­tor in oth­er ar­eas un­der the Cen­tral Gov­ern­ment sched­ule, but had been ne­glect­ing those ar­eas."We ac­tu­al­ly have sit­u­a­tions where in­sti­tu­tions set up in the THA are now be­ing mir­rored in the min­istry. We al­ready have a court mat­ter with the Cen­tral Gov­ern­ment, with one of the ar­eas where we think there was en­croach­ment."

Lon­don said Bak­er was col­lud­ing with the Gov­ern­ment "in or­der to un­der­mine the very in­sti­tu­tion for which the peo­ple have fought. I am ap­peal­ing to the de­cen­cy of the min­is­ter that he should not be col­lud­ing with his part­ners in the PP Gov­ern­ment to un­der­mine the au­ton­o­my of the in­sti­tu­tion which was set up to cater for the in­ter­est of the peo­ple."

Lon­don said he wrote the Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar on the mat­ter and "in fact, the min­is­ter did in­di­cate to me that he was car­ry­ing out the in­struc­tions of the Prime Min­is­ter."