Derek Achong

Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley is not yield­ing to calls to re­place Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Fitzger­ald Hinds, af­ter he presided over the coun­try’s high­est ever mur­der rate in a cal­en­dar year. 

De­liv­er­ing the fea­ture ad­dress at the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment’s (PNM’s) 50th Con­ven­tion at the Queen’s Park Sa­van­nah yes­ter­day evening, Dr Row­ley ac­knowl­edged that the coun­try’s record mur­der count this year was a cause for con­cern for his Gov­ern­ment and cit­i­zens but claimed that a Cab­i­net reshuf­fle was not the so­lu­tion. 

“I have seen it said that this can be rec­ti­fied by sim­ply ro­tat­ing min­is­ters or politi­cis­ing the crime-fight­ing ef­forts,” he said.

“All this will do, as it has been do­ing, is to em­bold­en the crim­i­nals who be­lieve that the rest of the coun­try does not have what it takes to bring the law­less­ness un­der con­trol,” he added. 

De­spite his state­ment on the is­sue, Dr Row­ley did ad­mit that new crime-fight­ing poli­cies and ini­tia­tives were need­ed to ad­dress the peren­ni­al is­sue. 

“The po­lice and oth­er se­cu­ri­ty agen­cies are per­ma­nent­ly en­gaged in crime de­tec­tion and sup­pres­sion but clear­ly the cur­rent sys­tems and meth­ods are not suf­fi­cient­ly ro­bust to bring the lev­el of safe­ty and se­cu­ri­ty that the pop­u­la­tion de­mands and de­serves,” Dr Row­ley said. 

Stat­ing that his gov­ern­ment was not pre­pared to con­cede the fight against crim­i­nal el­e­ments, Dr Row­ley said that he and his Cab­i­net would con­tin­ue to pro­vide re­sources to law en­force­ment agen­cies and the Ju­di­cia­ry. 

He al­so promised to con­tin­ue to im­prove the ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem and pro­vide pos­i­tive ac­tiv­i­ties for vul­ner­a­ble young peo­ple. 

“We will con­tin­ue to grow the econ­o­my so that job op­por­tu­ni­ties will con­tin­ue to be­come avail­able and we will en­cour­age and sup­port fam­i­lies to steer their sib­lings and prog­e­ny away from a life of crime and away from the clutch­es of the re­cruiters to a life of crime,” he said. 

Dr Row­ley spent the ma­jor­i­ty of his lit­tle over an hour-long speech fo­cus­ing on his gov­ern­ment’s nu­mer­ous “achieve­ments” in their two terms of of­fice, which be­gan in 2015. 

He made spe­cial em­pha­sis on the gov­ern­ment’s han­dling of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, its fis­cal poli­cies, and its stance on in­creas­ing the range and reach of so­cial pro­grammes de­spite eco­nom­ic chal­lenges. 

He al­so claimed that his gov­ern­ment’s ef­forts to bring a fi­nal res­o­lu­tion to the bil­lion-dol­lar bailout of CL Fi­nan­cial and its sub­sidiaries were its biggest achieve­ment in of­fice. 

Dr Row­ley al­so did not steer clear of his usu­al sharp cri­tique of the Op­po­si­tion Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress (UNC), who he ac­cused of re­peat­ed­ly at­tempt­ing to de­rail and sab­o­tage his gov­ern­ment’s ini­tia­tives. 

“We know that they have an over­flow­ing reser­voir of neg­a­tive vibes to draw from. There is al­so their co­pi­ous streams of dis­re­spect, vul­gar­i­ty, in­sults, and in­vec­tives but where are their use­ful al­ter­na­tives?” Dr Row­ley said. 

In his wide-rang­ing speech, Dr Row­ley al­so sought to ad­dress salary ne­go­ti­a­tion with pub­lic ser­vants, which is cur­rent­ly be­fore the In­dus­tri­al Court. 

While Dr Row­ley ad­mit­ted that the gov­ern­ment’s four per cent of­fer for 2014 to 2019 was not re­ceived with en­thu­si­asm by trade union lead­ers, he ex­pressed hope that the mat­ter would be quick­ly re­solved so that thou­sands of pub­lic ser­vants can re­ceive the up­dat­ed ben­e­fits. 

“I am per­son­al­ly grate­ful that more and more mem­bers of the gov­ern­ment em­ploy­ee groups are see­ing it pos­si­ble to ac­cept the of­fer on the ta­ble as the best for the mo­ment, in the hope that the next pe­ri­od could be ne­go­ti­at­ed quick­ly and if the na­tion­al for­tunes con­tin­ue to im­prove then a bet­ter of­fer may be on the hori­zon to get us all back to the hope­ful end of a rel­a­tive­ly dif­fi­cult pe­ri­od,” Dr Row­ley said.