Gail Alexan­der

It’s been just over two years in the mak­ing but the law to es­tab­lish re­gion­al cor­po­ra­tions—Diego Mar­tin and Siparia—as bor­oughs, is list­ed for de­bate in Par­lia­ment on Fri­day af­ter­noon.

Rur­al De­vel­op­ment and Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Min­is­ter Faris Al-Rawi will pi­lot the bill. It re­quires a sim­ple ma­jor­i­ty vote for pas­sage.

In No­vem­ber 2020, Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley an­nounced both cor­po­ra­tions would be­come bor­oughs by 2021. That was dur­ing the pan­dem­ic.

In March 2022, Row­ley again spoke of the two new bor­oughs to come, adding that the Diego Mar­tin Re­gion­al Cor­po­ra­tion, con­trolled by the PNM, had agreed and ad­vanced to the Cab­i­net that it wants Diego Mar­tin to be­come the next bor­ough.

In 2021, the Op­po­si­tion UNC, while wel­com­ing bor­ough sta­tus for UNC-con­trolled Siparia cor­po­ra­tion, warned the move should not be “cos­met­ic.”

UNC MP Khadi­jah Ameen (Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment spokesman) al­so ex­pressed con­cern over whether plans to up­grade Siparia in­to a bor­ough weren’t “just a po­lit­i­cal ploy to cre­ate a ‘PNM lean­ing’ in the con­stituen­cy held by Op­po­si­tion Leader Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar.

Mean­while, al­so at the Par­lia­ment sit­ting, Row­ley is ex­pect­ed to face a sec­ond round of “Ques­tions for the Prime Min­is­ter.”

House Speak­er Bridgid An­nisette-George re­cent­ly in­di­cat­ed that there would be two PMQ sit­tings this month in­stead of the usu­al sin­gle sit­ting for PMQs.

The PMQs are usu­al­ly done at the sec­ond sit­ting each month.

In Jan­u­ary, pro­ceed­ings in the Red House re­sumed on Jan­u­ary 20 with the Elec­toral Col­lege’s elec­tion of a Pres­i­dent.

The fol­low­ing sit­ting, on Jan­u­ary 27, was Pri­vate Mem­bers’ Day—for Op­po­si­tion Busi­ness. The first sit­ting at which PMQs were done was last Fri­day.

Al­so on to­day’s sup­ple­men­tal agen­da are amend­ments to the Firearms Amend­ment Bill 2022, which were made in the Sen­ate on Tues­day.

This in­cludes dele­tion of a con­tro­ver­sial clause which had pro­posed al­low­ing the Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter pow­er to ex­tend Firearms User’s Li­cences over the pe­ri­od stip­u­lat­ed in law. Op­po­si­tion and In­de­pen­dent sen­a­tors had ex­pressed strong con­cerns about that.