DA­REECE PO­LO

Se­nior Re­porter

da­reece.po­lo@guardian.co.tt

Two Gov­ern­ment min­is­ters are tak­ing aim at for­mer fi­nance min­is­ter Colm Im­bert, over what they call “false” and “mis­lead­ing” state­ments about the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress’ (UNC) of­fer to pub­lic ser­vants.

The con­tro­ver­sy erupt­ed fol­low­ing the pre­sen­ta­tion of the 2026 Bud­get, when Fi­nance Min­is­ter Dave Tan­coo an­nounced that the Chief Per­son­nel Of­fi­cer (CPO) had been in­struct­ed to be­gin wage ne­go­ti­a­tions with unions based on a 10 per cent start­ing point.

Im­bert, now a se­nior Op­po­si­tion MP, was quick to dis­miss the an­nounce­ment as “the biggest ma­m­aguay of all,” sug­gest­ing that the fig­ure was be­ing used to de­ceive pub­lic sec­tor work­ers in­to be­liev­ing they were be­ing of­fered more than they ac­tu­al­ly were.

Ac­cord­ing to Im­bert, the 10 per cent in­crease cit­ed by the Gov­ern­ment ap­plies on­ly to the 2014-2016 pe­ri­od, three years rather than six, and there­fore amounts to lit­tle more than a re­brand­ing of the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment’s (PNM) ear­li­er nine per cent of­fer.“I went and I looked at the state­ments made by the pres­i­dent of the PSA, the new one (Fe­l­isha Thomas) not the pre­vi­ous one (Leroy Bap­tiste), and it was clear that the promise that the UNC gave to them and the promise that the PSA lead­er­ship gave to its mem­ber­ship was that that 10% was for the first three years—2014 to 2016. It’s in black and white, in speech­es, in doc­u­ments and so on. We of­fered 4% for the first three and 5% for the sec­ond three— 9%. So, all they’ve done is tak­en 9% and sent it to 10%. They’ve done noth­ing. They just ma­m­aguayed all the work­ers. That is a fraud. That is de­cep­tion of the high­est,” Im­bert said.

His re­marks drew im­me­di­ate re­buke from Min­is­ter in the Min­istry of Fi­nance Ernesto Ke­sar and Labour Min­is­ter Leroy Bap­tiste, who ac­cused Im­bert of dis­tort­ing the facts to score po­lit­i­cal points.

Ke­sar de­fend­ed Gov­ern­ment’s po­si­tion, say­ing the 10 per cent of­fer rep­re­sents the start­ing frame­work for fresh ne­go­ti­a­tions and that nei­ther min­is­ters nor politi­cians have the au­thor­i­ty to de­ter­mine fi­nal out­comes.

“You and I can­not dic­tate what that will be,” Ke­sar told Guardian Me­dia.

“You and I can­not con­trol or at­tempt to in­ter­fere—which is what would have got­ten the last gov­ern­ment, the last regime, in trou­ble in the first place. There was al­ways the per­cep­tion of an in­ter­fer­ence with the col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing process by the third par­ty, which is cor­po­ra­tion sole, or in this case the Min­istry of Fi­nance.”

He main­tained that Gov­ern­ment’s cur­rent ap­proach aligns with stan­dard in­dus­tri­al re­la­tions prac­tice and that the process must re­main guid­ed by the CPO and union rep­re­sen­ta­tives rather than po­lit­i­cal fig­ures.

Labour Min­is­ter Bap­tiste was more blunt, de­scrib­ing Im­bert’s com­ments as “lies” and “mis­in­for­ma­tion.”

“That is a com­plete lie. Un­true. That nev­er took place,” Bap­tiste said.

“The gov­ern­ment would have put the 4% for the 6 years ‘take it or leave it’. When we said ‘no, we will not ac­cept that’, rather than con­tin­ue ne­go­ti­a­tions at that point in time, they re­ferred the mat­ter to the spe­cial tri­bunal. In oth­er words, ne­go­ti­a­tion broke down for 2014 to 2019—that six-year pe­ri­od.”

Bap­tiste, who pre­vi­ous­ly served as PSA pres­i­dent, said Im­bert lat­er added an­oth­er five per cent for 2020-2022 just be­fore the 2025 gen­er­al elec­tion, mak­ing it a nine-year of­fer tied to two sep­a­rate pe­ri­ods. He stressed that the cur­rent 10 per cent pro­pos­al, first promised by the UNC dur­ing its elec­tion cam­paign, ap­plies to the 2014 to 2019 pe­ri­od and seeks to cor­rect what he de­scribed as the PNM’s “fail­ure to de­liv­er.”

“The last gov­ern­ment is the last gov­ern­ment be­cause it couldn’t do it,” Ke­sar added.

“That’s why we are the Gov­ern­ment and we will.”

The PSA, which rep­re­sents tens of thou­sands of pub­lic of­fi­cers, is press­ing for a deal and pay­out be­fore Christ­mas.