Senior Producer
soyini.grey@guardian.co.tt
Activist Wendell Eversley is lambasting the Tobago House of Assembly Chief Secretary Farley Augustine for “inappropriate and unacceptable conduct” in office and has delivered a letter to Augustine calling on him to resign immediately and call elections.
“Farley got to go!” Eversley said during a media conference outside the Victor E Bruce Financial Complex in Scarborough, moments before he delivered the letter.
Eversley’s call comes in the wake of an audio clip leaked online a week ago that purports to be THA executives discussing a strategy to hire people under the aegis of the THA to spread propaganda via social media for the Tobago People Party.
In the audio clip, a male voice is heard saying, “Find the plan. Create the plan, the strategy or whatever. Bring it here once you get approval. Where it is you have 13 people now, you might need five or seven to do the strict PR. You could use some to do some propaganda. Whether you going to use fake profiles, whether they going to use their own profiles, whatever they do. What you would have to consider is finding a way to employ people on the THA side. Could be menial tasks.”
It is this clip Eversley finds egregious and yesterday he rhetorically asked the Chief Secretary, “You say you going to fix it, but what fixing you doing, you fixing yourself?”
He added, “Let Tobagonians go back to the polls because Tobagonians didn’t vote for this!”
He also made it clear he was monitoring the responses from other political activists and commentators, including Hochoy Charles, Dr Vanus James and most tellingly, Dr Winford James. Of the latter Eversley said he found his silence most concerning.
“Winford James commenting on all sort of things, but here it is, Winford James ent say a word. I don’t know if it is Winford James gone dumb,” Eversley said.
Dr James had been vociferous in his support of the PDP and Augustine in the past, and welcomed their sweeping 14-1 defeat of the People’s National Movement in the THA election of December 6, 2021.
Dr James had been appointed to the Studley Park board but was removed after a public outcry. He is now the chair of the THA-Venture Capital Equity Fund. His brother Trevor James is the Secretary of Secretary of Infrastructure, Quarries and Development.
In an immediate response, however, Dr James advised Eversley that he needed to review local media again, since he (Dr James) had in fact shared his thoughts on the matter with Tobago Updates.
Addressing the audio clip, Dr James said it lacks sufficient context.
“I formed the opinion that it was incoherent and insufficient for me to use as a basis to make a judgment.” On the issue of the THA hiring persons to spread propaganda on social media, James described it as a type of make-work scheme, saying, “If the clip has the House of Assembly employing people for political gain, I would say that I know of no jurisdiction where that does not occur.”
Neither Chief Secretary Augustine nor any of his executives have commented on the validity of the audio clip to date.