Dr Keith Christopher Rowley, Prime Minister of T&T, officially started the ‘silly season’ with his claims that Opposition Leader, Mrs Kamla Persad-Bissessar, told his former Cabinet minister, Marlene McDonald, that police was going to lock her (Marlene) up. All of this under the guise of parliamentary privilege.
As it stands, the cumulative wisdom of the entire population is still unable to figure out why PM Rowley thinks he was justified in raising ‘Emailgate.’ The emails were proven to be fake and the manner in which the Prime Minister dealt with the emails was bad, as a matter of decent public standards.
The Prime Minister has made two statements on Sat Maharaj and the law of sedition, the second at a public meeting in Barataria. Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj, SC and Jagdeo Singh, head of Fortis Chambers, on September 7th at a Maha Sabha press conference, legally travelled the Commonwealth and the United States of America to show how archaic and irrelevant the Sedition Act is.
The public debate over these laws has now really picked up momentum. One wonders whether the public pressure is simply too much and requires a distraction to matters like the axing of the Housing Development Corporation US$1.7 million contract with Chinese construction company Gezhouba Group International Engineering Company Limited.
As the political pressure keeps mounting on the Government to perform, PM Rowley’s Cabinet has made misstep after misstep. Persad-Bissessar’s alleged intuition over the prosecution of McDonald is but a red-herring. If Persad-Bissessar did know and informed McDonald, I congratulate her for being well-informed.
How realistic is the notion that someone told Persad-Bissessar that McDonald was about to be charged? The Commissioner of Police has already conducted his due diligence and has stated that it would have been impossible for any person to have known that McDonald was going to be charged.
According to the T&T Guardian of September 12, 2019, Police Commissioner Gary Griffith, “rubbished any credibility in revelations that one of his officers leaked plans to arrest the then Public Administration Minister to Opposition Leader Kamla Persad-Bissessar.”
Commissioner Griffith further noted that if there was any truth that Persad-Bissessar reportedly told MacDonald, then she got the information from a very good fortune teller. “It is absolutely impossible that anyone could have made such a statement and be accurate about it several weeks before,” said Griffith in the T&T Guardian.
When McDonald was informed as such by Persad-Bissessar, what did she do with such information? It is self-serving to say the least for McDonald to now come forward and say that she reported it to AG Faris Al-Rawi. Again, it is difficult that AG Al-Rawi did not know anything, since he and Minister Stuart Young always talking in the Parliament about charges about to be laid against Opposition MPs.
Why would the Opposition Leader notify Ms McDonald is the question that I can’t get past? What would she have hoped to achieve by informing Ms McDonald. At this time, it appears that Prime Minister Dr Rowley needs a distraction and ‘to kill two birds with one stone.’ There seems to be an attempt to impugn the strong charges laid against Ms McDonald. I hope that the Commissioner of Police and the Director of Public Prosecutions seriously consider whether there is any attempt to pervert the course of justice.
One cannot help but think that PM Rowley and AG Al-Rawi did not know about possible charges being preferred against their PNM Cabinet colleague. To follow the PNM’s propaganda surrounding the issue means that Dr Rowley should resign as Prime Minister. If Mrs Persad-Bissessar has that kind of intelligence instead of Rowley, who is the head of the National Security Council, then on a merit basis, he should not be the Prime Minister at all, but Persad-Bissessar should.
He who asserts must prove. I learnt this years ago on a popular TV Series called ‘Law and Order.’ The onus or burden or duty is cast on those who have stated that Ms McDonald was informed by Mrs Persad-Bissessar. It’s not the other way around.
Persad-Bissessar is a brilliant and experienced attorney at law and knows only too well that she must not be made to disprove flimsy allegations. I disagree with the T&T Guardian editorial which said that, ‘Kamla can run but she can’t hide.’ The lady is very visible across the country campaigning for both the upcoming Local and General Elections.
In fact, Persad-Bissessar is now in a political attack mode as she targets Minister of Finance Colm Imbert. In a newspaper article of September 11, 2019, it was reported that: “Opposition Leader Kamla Persad-Bissessar, on Monday publicly urged Finance Minister Colm Imbert to say if he had declared his alleged personal interest in an apartment block at Picton Street, Port-of-Spain.”
Emailgate, the Netflix series on Cambridge Analytica and now these allegations. For now, it seems that silly season is already upon us in the lead-up to elections.