Mem­ber of Par­lia­ment for Pointe a Pierre and Deputy Po­lit­i­cal Leader of the UNC, Dr David Lee MP, has de­scribed the late Fazal Karim as “an in­no­va­tor” and a man de­ter­mined to make a dif­fer­ence in the coun­try.

In an of­fi­cial state­ment is­sued to­day, Dr Lee ex­pressed sad­ness at the pass­ing of his for­mer Par­lia­men­tary Col­league, say­ing he will al­ways be re­mem­bered for his ded­i­ca­tion to Trinidad and To­ba­go.

“Fazal Karim was an in­no­va­tor, he was dri­ven to make a dif­fer­ence in our na­tion­al land­scape & com­mit­ted to pro­gress­ing our so­ci­ety,” he stat­ed.

“Fazal left his mark on the tech­ni­cal and vo­ca­tion­al sec­tor of our coun­try. Led by Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad Bisses­sar, as Min­is­ter of Ter­tiary Ed­u­ca­tion and Skills Train­ing, Fazal Karim in­sti­tut­ed some of the most dy­nam­ic re­forms to tech­ni­cal train­ing in our na­tion which ben­e­fit­ed hun­dreds of young peo­ple,” the Pointe-a-Pierre MP said.  “Fazal un­der­stood that the great­est re­source of this na­tion was our Youth and he was de­ter­mined to nur­ture, grow and de­vel­op our Youth.”

Dr Lee, who had served as the Chair­man of the MIC In­sti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy while Fazal Karim was the Ter­tiary Ed­u­ca­tion & Skills Train­ing Min­is­ter, re­count­ed a cou­ple of Mr Karim’s key achieve­ments while in of­fice.

“We will al­ways re­mem­ber his fa­mous words ‘from cut­ting cane to fly­ing plane’ when he launched the Avi­a­tion In­sti­tute which was geared to train stu­dents not on­ly in Avi­a­tion stud­ies but in var­i­ous ar­eas in­clud­ing rig­ging op­er­a­tions, sys­tem func­tions, ra­dio/radar sys­tems and pneu­mat­ics/hy­draulics. It was the first of its kind in the Caribbean, a project aimed at open­ing up the field of avi­a­tion to all who had a dream of en­ter­ing this in­dus­try,” he re­called.

“An­oth­er of his rev­o­lu­tion­ary projects was the launch of the Na­tion­al En­er­gy Skills Cen­tre (NESC) Drilling Acad­e­my with a rig for train­ing. This was geared not on­ly to cre­at­ing a more skilled labour force for our en­er­gy sec­tor, but it was aimed at train­ing our Youth to be a di­rect part of this na­tion's back­bone in­dus­try, the en­er­gy sec­tor,” he said.

He added: “My thoughts and prayers go out to his wife Mrs. Judy Karim, his chil­dren Rhon­da, Ria and Rhion as well as all loved ones.”