Resh­ma Ra­goonath

?Sport Min­is­ter Gary Hunt has brushed off calls for his res­ig­na­tion one day af­ter he ad­mit­ted the Sports Com­pa­ny of Trinidad and To­ba­go (Sportt) made a mis­step in the in­stal­la­tion of a $2 mil­lion na­tion­al flag at the Hase­ly Craw­ford Sta­di­um, Port-of-Spain.

Hunt, when ques­tioned about Ch­agua­nas West MP Jack Warn­er's call for his res­ig­na­tion, said: "Do we ex­pect any­thing dif­fer­ent from an Op­po­si­tion politi­cian? Well. There you go. You have your an­swer." Hunt paid a sur­prise vis­it to Cowen Hamil­ton Sec­ondary School, Moru­ga, yes­ter­day to de­liv­er a con­grat­u­la­to­ry let­ter to young ath­lete Abi­o­la Wal­lace. The min­is­ter used the op­por­tu­ni­ty to re­it­er­ate the Gov­ern­ment's po­si­tion on the con­tro­ver­sial $2 mil­lion na­tion­al flag, stat­ing it was an er­ror which was un­der re­view.

Hunt said: "The idea be­hind erect­ing a na­tion­al flag at a fa­cil­i­ty named af­ter our on­ly Olympic gold medal­ist was a no­ble one but we made some er­rors in the im­ple­men­ta­tion." He said Sportt had been di­rect­ed to re­view its poli­cies and pro­ce­dures to en­sure the er­ror was not re­peat­ed. The min­is­ter ad­mit­ted that many raised con­cerns about the flag and he had lis­tened be­cause "when you ex­e­cute poli­cies on the pub­lic's be­half you have to be able to meet the pub­lic's ex­pec­ta­tions." While he stood by the in­stal­la­tion of the flag, he ad­mit­ted "the im­ple­men­ta­tion did not meet the ex­pec­ta­tions." Hunt did not in­di­cate what cor­rec­tive steps would be tak­en to en­sure there was no re­oc­cur­rence of the mis­take. He said: "if hav­ing re­viewed what took place and I have to ap­proach some­thing sim­i­lar in the fu­ture we would en­sure the pub­lic's ex­pec­ta­tion will be met."

The min­is­ter in­di­cat­ed the pur­pose of his vis­it to the school was to help en­cour­age Wal­lace, a 12 year-old form two stu­dent, to con­tin­ue to ex­cel. The ath­lete re­ceived her run­ning spikes last month. She was suc­cess­ful in the South Re­gion­als re­cent­ly where she copped two gold medals for track and field. The blush­ing long-dis­tance run­ner said she was ex­cit­ed and was sur­prised the min­is­ter would come es­pe­cial­ly to vis­it her at her school. Wal­lace's form teacher, Leslie Anne Samuel, was re­spon­si­ble for the min­is­ter's vis­it since she wrote an e-mail to him ap­peal­ing for shoes for the promis­ing ath­lete.