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Sunday, July 20, 2025

Rambharat slams UNC flood ‘gallerying’

by

Gail Alexander
2462 days ago
20181022
Minister of Agriculture Clarence Rambarat, centre, travels with Mayaro residents through flood waters to reach their homes on Saturday.

Minister of Agriculture Clarence Rambarat, centre, travels with Mayaro residents through flood waters to reach their homes on Saturday.

RISHI RAGOONATH

Agri­cul­ture Min­is­ter Clarence Ramb­harat has de­fend­ed Gov­ern­ment against UNC Sen­a­tor Kadi­jah Ameen’s crit­i­cisms it had failed on man­ag­ing the flood dev­as­ta­tion.

Ramb­harat said he worked with sol­diers on flood re­lief is­sues since last Fri­day, spent sev­en hours on a truck with Princes Town Re­gion­al Cor­po­ra­tion work­ers as­sist­ing Ma­yaro res­i­dents and he’d per­son­al­ly fer­ried emer­gency med­ical cas­es to the Ma­yaro Health Cen­tre. He said he al­so as­sist­ed work­ers in putting a preg­nant woman on a liv­ing room chair on a trac­tor-trail­er to take her to hos­pi­tal.

“Every fin­ger that could be lift­ed has been lift­ed in the last few days and cit­i­zens re­spond­ed, some­times ex­ces­sive­ly.

“Yes­ter­day we had too much food. We can’t—for po­lit­i­cal mileage—di­min­ish the hu­man re­sponse that oc­curred. We chose to al­low our Low­er House col­leagues to han­dle things while we take the busi­ness of the Bud­get for­ward,” he ex­plained.

He said go­ing in­to flood wa­ters “in ca­noe” wasn’t for every­one, since he had col­leagues who he want­ed with him in floods and oth­ers who he didn’t want to send there.

He said Trade Min­is­ter Paula Gopee-Scoon had busi­ness con­tacts and mo­bilised items. He said he had an­oth­er Gov­ern­ment col­league “get on” to ANSA McAL for a mil­lion-dol­lar do­na­tion and yet an­oth­er got en­er­gy com­pa­nies’ pledges of as­sis­tance.

“This (sit­u­a­tion) isn’t for gallery, when you give a per­son some­thing, you don’t say this was brought by X. You do the peo­ple’s busi­ness and gallery down the road.

“To­day’s not the day for that. You don’t need a UNC flag to res­cue and help peo­ple. I won’t let any­one di­min­ish the work of the peo­ple of T&T,” he said, adding he had his boots and tools at the Sen­ate and would change and get back to work af­ter the de­bate, which was wrapped up yes­ter­day af­ter UNC sen­a­tors walked out the House.


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