SOYI­NI GREY

Se­nior Re­porter

soyi­ni.grey@guardian.co.tt

Po­lit­i­cal ob­servers say it ap­pears Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley is try­ing to make cor­rup­tion a hot-but­ton is­sue of the 2025 elec­tion cam­paign.

Re­act­ing to Row­ley’s state­ments at a me­dia con­fer­ence at White­hall yes­ter­day, po­lit­i­cal sci­en­tist Prof Hamid Ghany said by re­spond­ing to Op­po­si­tion Leader Kam­la Per­sad-Bissess­er’s “All them In­di­an is thief” com­ment, Row­ley took her bait. Ghany said while racism is the en­gine of pol­i­tics in de­vel­op­ing coun­tries, Row­ley tried to re­frame the is­sue to be cor­rup­tion.

Dur­ing yes­ter­day’s brief­ing, Row­ley con­demned Per­sad-Bisses­sar’s race links to the court mat­ter in­volv­ing the Es­tate Man­age­ment and Busi­ness De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny (EM­BD) and MP Dr Roodal Mooni­lal, ar­gu­ing that sys­tems ought to be in place to charge even pub­lic of­fice­hold­ers with crimes if they com­mit them. He dis­tanced his Gov­ern­ment from the case.

Point­ing jour­nal­ists to the clos­ing re­marks of for­mer UK prime min­is­ter David Cameron at the An­ti-Cor­rup­tion Sum­mit 2016 in Lon­don, Row­ley said, “Trinidad and To­ba­go, as we’d done be­fore un­der prime min­is­ter Patrick Man­ning, com­mit­ted to res­olute­ly root out white-col­lar crime as it oc­curs in our coun­try.”

Po­lit­i­cal an­a­lyst Dr Shane Mo­hammed agreed that Row­ley was at­tempt­ing to make cor­rup­tion, not racism, the re­al is­sue.

“The dis­cus­sion is about what we ex­pect from pub­lic of­fice­hold­ers in terms of their eth­i­cal be­hav­iours and the ex­pec­ta­tion of ser­vice and that’s the stan­dard that must be set by all po­lit­i­cal par­ties at all lev­els,” he said.

How­ev­er, he not­ed that none of the points Row­ley made were new or unique. Mo­hammed al­so said all po­lit­i­cal lead­ers need to show some lead­er­ship by root­ing out cor­rupt prac­tices, in­clud­ing from their par­ties.

On the mat­ter of racism in pol­i­tics, Mo­hammed said T&T cit­i­zens en­gage in racism by proxy, mean­ing they en­gage in the mat­ter around elec­tion time, and for the most part, it is not an is­sue that aris­es out­side of that.

“If we were racist, then we would have se­ri­ous cul­tur­al and racial and so­ci­etal di­vide in Trinidad and To­ba­go that would have caused all of us to be con­cerned about where we go, how we go, how we in­ter­act, how we dress, what we wear, how we cel­e­brate, where we wor­ship...that sort of thing,” Mo­hammed said.