Op­po­si­tion Leader Pen­ne­lope Beck­les has crit­i­cised the Gov­ern­ment’s re­cent de­ci­sion to ter­mi­nate more than 400 work­ers em­ployed un­der the Un­em­ploy­ment Re­lief Pro­gramme across 12 re­gion­al cor­po­ra­tions.

She ques­tioned where was the “love” the Prime Min­is­ter pro­fessed for the peo­ple of T&T. How­ev­er, Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar, in re­sponse, said she loved peo­ple but does not like “ghosts”.

On Wednes­day, Rur­al De­vel­op­ment and Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Min­is­ter Khadi­jah Ameen con­firmed the ter­mi­na­tions and de­fend­ed the Gov­ern­ment’s ac­tions, say­ing a re­struc­tur­ing of the “make work” pro­gramme was a nec­es­sary step to com­bat decades of what she de­scribed as en­trenched cor­rup­tion.

She re­ject­ed ac­cu­sa­tions that the dis­missals were po­lit­i­cal­ly mo­ti­vat­ed, stat­ing, “For decades, when­ev­er there is a change in gov­ern­ment, they would fire all the per­sons work­ing in URP and re­place them with peo­ple who are po­lit­i­cal­ly aligned to the gov­ern­ment. This time, we did not do that.”

But dur­ing a po­lit­i­cal meet­ing in Diego Mar­tin on Wednes­day evening, Beck­les ac­cused the ad­min­is­tra­tion of tar­get­ing vul­ner­a­ble cit­i­zens with­out of­fer­ing a cred­i­ble jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for the mass ter­mi­na­tion.

“In Ari­ma, they went with 51 let­ters in one day. These peo­ple have any shame? Fifty-one peo­ple. I want to say to those in head of­fice, watch out for to­mor­row. Many of you who are here, whether you have chil­dren or don’t have chil­dren, you un­der­stand the pain and suf­fer­ing and frus­tra­tion of los­ing your jobs al­most for no rea­son be­cause they can­not give you a good rea­son as to why they send home every sin­gle con­trac­tor, every sin­gle work­er.”

She fur­ther con­tend­ed that the move re­flects a wider pat­tern of job­less­ness un­der the Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar-led Gov­ern­ment.

“Let us un­der­stand that this Gov­ern­ment is sit­ting down every day, plan­ning and plot­ting to send peo­ple of Trinidad and To­ba­go home, and I want to re­mind you they go­ing to cre­ate 50,000 jobs. But it’s called math­e­mat­ics; you send home 50,000, and then you em­ploy 50,000 if they could do that.”

Beck­les was al­so crit­i­cal of how Gov­ern­ment’s han­dled the ter­mi­na­tions.

“For me as a politi­cian, if you have to make an an­nounce­ment about send­ing home peo­ple, you know you will feel a lit­tle shame or cow­ard not them. They’re proud, and they want to jus­ti­fy and talk about cor­rup­tion and ghosts and au­dit. They now come and know every­thing that wrong.”

Beck­les al­so ques­tioned the Prime Min­is­ter’s “love” for cit­i­zens. “You would have been watch­ing the swear­ing-in of the ho­n­ourable Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar and every word, ‘I love you, I love you, I love my peo­ple.’ How do you love peo­ple and fire them?”

How­ev­er, re­spond­ing to Beck­les’ crit­i­cism yes­ter­day, Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar said, “I love peo­ple, but I don’t like ghosts,” re­fer­ring to long-stand­ing claims of ghost gangs in the URP.