An­ge­lo Je­didi­ah

As the Sen­ate de­bates the Prime Min­is­ter’s Pen­sion (Amend­ment) Bill, po­lit­i­cal sci­en­tist Dr In­di­ra Ram­per­sad has crit­i­cised the Op­po­si­tion for ab­stain­ing from last week’s vote in the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives.

Of the 41 MPs, 27—in­clud­ing UNC mem­bers and both To­ba­go Peo­ple’s Par­ty (TPP) MPs—vot­ed in favour of the bill. Eleven Op­po­si­tion MPs present chose to ab­stain.

Speak­ing on CNC3’s The Morn­ing Brew, Dr Ram­per­sad clar­i­fied that she was not ad­vo­cat­ing for any po­lit­i­cal par­ty, but ar­gued the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) still ap­pears to mis­un­der­stand the rea­sons be­hind its crush­ing April 2025 elec­tion de­feat.

“I think it is in the Op­po­si­tion’s in­ter­est to sup­port this bill. They suf­fered a crush­ing de­feat in the elec­tions re­cent­ly… this is one of the is­sues that led to that de­feat,” she said.

Ram­per­sad said the ap­point­ment of Stu­art Young as Prime Min­is­ter and the per­cep­tion that some­one could re­ceive a full pen­sion af­ter such a short tenure sparked pub­lic out­rage.

“There is wide­spread pub­lic opin­ion against that—not just min­is­ter Stu­art Young but any in­di­vid­ual get­ting that kind of pen­sion af­ter one day as PM. So this is the eth­i­cal con­sid­er­a­tion,” she said.

As the Sen­ate de­bates the bill’s amend­ments to­day, Ram­per­sad called for both le­gal and eth­i­cal con­cerns to be tak­en se­ri­ous­ly.