Jesse Ramdeo

UNC deputy leader Khadi­jah Ameen has steered clear of spec­u­lat­ing on a mo­tive as to why Kel­ly Vil­lage/War­renville coun­cil­lor Samuel Sankar ig­nored calls by Op­po­si­tion Leader Kam­la Per­sad Bisses­sar to boy­cott a meet­ing on re­form with Min­is­ter of Rur­al De­vel­op­ment and Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Faris Al-Rawi yes­ter­day.

Sankar was the lone UNC coun­cil­lor at the meet­ing and ex­plained that he on­ly learnt of the di­rec­tive up­on his ar­rival for the meet­ing. De­spite that, Sankar still stayed for the meet­ing.

Dur­ing the UNC’s Mon­day Night Fo­rum, Per­sad-Bisses­sar called on coun­cil­lors to boy­cott the meet­ing, which was aimed at dis­cussing sev­er­al lo­cal gov­ern­ment mat­ters.

Ques­tioned about the coun­cil­lor’s par­tic­i­pa­tion dur­ing a UNC press con­fer­ence yes­ter­day, Ameen said she did not li­aise with Sankar over the mat­ter, which raised spec­u­la­tions about whether or not he had bro­ken ranks from the par­ty.

She said, “I did not com­mu­ni­cate with coun­cil­lor Sankar, so I don’t know. The thing is coun­cil­lors took a de­ci­sion. I saw Faris Al-Rawi try­ing to make it sound like Kam­la forced peo­ple not to at­tend. If Mr Sankar made that state­ment, I’m not aware of it, I did not com­mu­ni­cate with him so I can’t speak for him.”

Ameen al­so de­fend­ed the de­ci­sion tak­en by the op­po­si­tion to boy­cott the meet­ing.

She said, “You know how many meet­ings our coun­cil­lors have at­tend­ed ...nu­mer­ous. They do not lis­ten to us, they do not take our re­quest in­to con­sid­er­a­tion. They have heads of sec­tions, heads of cor­po­ra­tions meet­ings every month where the chair­men and CEOs at­tend in the Min­istry of Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment, noth­ing comes out of it.”

The UNC’s press con­fer­ence was at­tend­ed by sev­er­al lo­cal gov­ern­ment coun­cil­lors, al­der­men and Ch­agua­nas May­or Faaiq Mo­hammed.

Ac­cord­ing to Mo­hammed, the ma­jor prob­lem plagu­ing cor­po­ra­tions con­tin­ued to be the dif­fi­cul­ties in ac­cess­ing funds from cen­tral gov­ern­ment.

He said the Ch­agua­nas Bor­ough Cor­po­ra­tion was starved for re­sources to the point where work­ers’ jobs were un­der threat.