Akash Sama­roo

Rur­al De­vel­op­ment and Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Min­is­ter Khadi­jah Ameen is ac­cus­ing the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) of seek­ing to de­fend al­leged cor­rup­tion and crim­i­nal­i­ty that the gov­ern­ment is try­ing to root out of the Un­em­ploy­ment Re­lief Pro­gramme (URP).

On Wednes­day, the gov­ern­ment is­sued 400 ter­mi­na­tion let­ters to month­ly-paid URP em­ploy­ees, leav­ing 700 work­ers on its pay­roll.

De­fend­ing the move, Ameen said, “The ini­tial au­dit re­ports from the URP in­di­cate not on­ly a pro­lif­er­a­tion of ghost gangs, but al­so ghost em­ploy­ees, month­ly-paid of­fi­cers with­in var­i­ous of­fices, even the head of­fice, and the crim­i­nal el­e­ment own­ing gangs, re­ceiv­ing thou­sands of dol­lars every fort­night. That is a se­ri­ous con­cern.”

On Thurs­day, San Fer­nan­do East MP Bri­an Man­ning an­nounced that lawyers would take the gov­ern­ment to court over what he de­scribed as the “un­just” dis­missal of the 400 work­ers.

Re­spond­ing to­day, Ameen said she is be­mused as to why the PNM is de­fend­ing what she de­scribed as glar­ing cor­rup­tion. “I know there will be a crim­i­nal el­e­ment los­ing thou­sands of dol­lars who will op­pose us stop­ping this pro­gramme. It’s a shame that the PNM is de­fend­ing crim­i­nals re­ceiv­ing tax­pay­ers’ mon­ey be­cause they fa­cil­i­tat­ed it while in gov­ern­ment. So we are tak­ing the hard de­ci­sion,” she said.

Ameen added that the mon­ey saved from the gov­ern­ment’s ac­tion will be “chan­nelled to­wards more peo­ple get­ting em­ploy­ment at dif­fer­ent lev­els to do mean­ing­ful work. These will be more sus­tain­able jobs, rather than work­ing one fort­night and then not know­ing when you’ll work again, while crim­i­nals tax you and so on.”

The URP line min­is­ter said she looks for­ward to more peo­ple ac­cess­ing mean­ing­ful jobs.

Dur­ing the gov­ern­ment’s re­struc­tur­ing of CEPEP and the sub­se­quent ter­mi­na­tions, Pub­lic Util­i­ties Min­is­ter Bar­ry Padarath al­so promised that more “sus­tain­able” jobs would be cre­at­ed.

How­ev­er, the gov­ern­ment has not yet ex­plic­it­ly stat­ed when these new jobs will be­come avail­able or what they will en­tail.