Shir­van Williams

The trade union move­ment will nev­er give up on the Gov­ern­ment. This was the view ex­pressed by Min­is­ter of Hous­ing and En­vi­ron­ment Dr Roodal Mooni­lal yes­ter­day as he spoke to mem­bers of the me­dia af­ter a dis­tri­b­u­tion cer­e­mo­ny of cer­tifi­cates of com­fort by the Land Set­tle­ment Agency (LSA), at the An­dre Kaper­veen Au­di­to­ri­um, Cen­tre of Ex­cel­lence, Ma­coya. Mooni­lal was re­fer­ring to the re­cent de­ci­sion of David Ab­du­lah, leader of the Move­ment for So­cial Jus­tice (MSJ), to with­draw his mem­bers from all state boards. The Hous­ing Min­is­ter said he had been re­ceiv­ing texts all morn­ing from var­i­ous mem­bers of the labour move­ment, of­fer­ing their ser­vices to re­place Ab­du­lah. "I had to re­mind them that Sen­a­tor Ab­du­lah is in place," he said. Mooni­lal said the Gov­ern­ment was wait­ing for the MSJ to iden­ti­fy the state boards it would be with­draw­ing from. He said as soon as this was done, the Gov­ern­ment should not have any prob­lems find­ing re­place­ments.

He al­lud­ed to the sit­u­a­tion of when Caribbean Air­lines (CAL) for­mer chair­man George Nicholas III re­signed his po­si­tion, say­ing the Gov­ern­ment found a way to re­place him with­in 24 hours. Mooni­lal said the sit­u­a­tion was just part of coali­tion gov­ern­ment. "The en­tire ex­pe­ri­ence of coali­tion pol­i­tics is new. It is re­al­ly an ex­pe­ri­ence of agree­ing at times and dis­agree­ing at times." He said he be­lieved Ab­du­lah was the one now put in a dif­fi­cult po­si­tion be­cause he is still a sen­a­tor but has a crit­i­cal view of the Gov­ern­ment. Mooni­lal said he did not un­der­stand Ab­du­lah's com­ments, es­pe­cial­ly as the MSJ was guilty of the same prac­tices it was crit­i­cis­ing. "The fact is the MSJ them­selves are on sev­er­al state boards which they now with­draw them­selves from. That is ac­tu­al­ly par­ty pa­tron­age. Mr Ab­du­lah is con­demn­ing the process which he par­tic­i­pat­ed in." He said no one could point a fin­ger at the Gov­ern­ment and ac­cuse it of cor­rup­tion. In fact, he said the Gov­ern­ment had adopt­ed a pol­i­cy where­by no fam­i­ly mem­bers of any min­is­ter could be ap­point­ed to state boards. Mooni­lal said the PP Gov­ern­ment had a bet­ter han­dle on state af­fairs than the pre­vi­ous ad­min­is­tra­tion and used the Ur­ban De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny (Ude­cott) as an ex­am­ple.