Jesse Ramdeo

Op­po­si­tion Chief Whip Mar­vin Gon­za­les is warn­ing that the Gov­ern­ment’s al­leged cam­paign to re­move ex­ec­u­tive pro­fes­sion­als across key state en­ti­ties, in­clud­ing the re­cent de­ci­sion to send Chief of De­fence Staff Air Vice-Mar­shal Dar­ryl Daniel on leave, could have far-reach­ing con­se­quences for na­tion­al sta­bil­i­ty and se­cu­ri­ty.

At a news con­fer­ence to­day, Gon­za­les cau­tioned cit­i­zens to be wary of what he de­scribed as the Gov­ern­ment’s “dan­ger­ous and desta­bil­is­ing” ac­tions against ex­pe­ri­enced pro­fes­sion­als. He said that while it is cus­tom­ary for a new ad­min­is­tra­tion to ap­point its own state board mem­bers, the con­tin­ued dis­missal of ex­ec­u­tives and tech­ni­cal ex­perts rep­re­sents a di­rect at­tack on the coun­try’s in­sti­tu­tion­al strength.

Gon­za­les cit­ed dis­missals across sev­er­al state en­ti­ties, in­clud­ing the Wa­ter and Sew­er­age Au­thor­i­ty (WASA), the Trinidad and To­ba­go Elec­tric­i­ty Com­mis­sion (T&TEC), First Cit­i­zens Bank (FCB), Her­itage Pe­tro­le­um, and Caribbean Air­lines (CAL), as ev­i­dence of what he called a trou­bling pat­tern of po­lit­i­cal­ly mo­ti­vat­ed in­ter­fer­ence.

He re­called that un­der the last Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) ad­min­is­tra­tion, WASA un­der­went a de­lib­er­ate process to re­cruit “the best lo­cal and re­gion­al minds” to im­prove its man­age­ment and ef­fi­cien­cy.