The war words rages on as accusation of lies, lack of accountability and no representation continues to be exchanged between area representative for Parlatuvier/L’ Anse Fourmi/Speyside Farley Augustine and representative for Signal Hill/Lambeau Tracy Davidson Celestine.
Augustine has accused Davidson Celestine of once again not being able to account for taxpayers’ money and using State funds to solicit votes in the last THA elections while Davidson-Celestine in turn has accused Augustine of being untruthful and failing to represent his constituents.
The back and forth stemmed from an Auditor General’s Report which covered the period October 2019 to September 2020.
The report raised a number of discrepancies in the disbursement of Tobago’s COVID-19 relief measures.
Six of the 10 THA Divisions were highlighted and the total value of the funds under query is $8,524,430.
One of the divisions in question, the Division of Health, Wellness and Family Development is head by Tracy Davidson Celestine.
According to the report, established procedures for distributing $658,430 in food cards vouchers were not adhered to.
As a result, a number of food vouchers distributed could not be accurately determined and it was, therefore, unable to ascertain if the vouchers reached persons in need.
Speaking on several media platforms, Augustine again accused Davidson- Celestine of misappropriation
“Tracy Davidson Celestine, the same secretary who wanted to sue me for talking about the zipline, the same secretary who has no accountability when it comes to taxpayers’ money,” Augustine said.
He said he was outraged because in spite of assisting scores of people on his constituency with filling out the application forms for assistance, quite of number of the applicants never received any.
Augustine also published several lists and copies of the applications he submitted on behalf of his constituents and emphasised that he never received food cards and vouchers from the THA for distribution to his constituents.
“Close to $700,000 in food vouchers cannot be accounted for, the Auditor General found it wasn’t public servant it was from Office of the Secretary, the office managed by Tracy Davidson Celestine,” Augustine said.
The PDP Deputy Political Leader also accused Davidson-Celestine of hand-delivering food vouchers in his constituency.
He said, “The Secretary of Health showed up at the Blue Waters Hotel one day to give out food vouchers, she showed up, not social workers, she showed up to hand-deliver the food vouchers.”
Davidson-Celestine was unrelenting in her response.
She said her Division has spent a total of $9 million in social support to over 3,000 people since the start of the pandemic and of that figure 1,920 food vouchers and 400 hampers have been distributed, totalling $1.5 million.
According to the secretary, the focus has always been on ensuring that people receive the basic level of care through food and shelter.
She said, “A process was devised to provide full support to Tobagonians. This process did not take into consideration the urgent need to provide support to the vulnerable people who would walk into the division who were assessed in a particular way, these people would wait until we were able to churn out support.”
She said her division was overwhelmed with requests for assistance as many days people would flock to her office seeking assistance.
She accused Augustine of trying to “tarnish her character’ by accusing her of hand delivering vouchers in his district.
She added: “There was a distribution system in place at various community centres and I visited several of them to meet with the persons in need and to also oversee the process to ensure that the needs of persons were being met.”
Accusing Augustine of “talking from all sides of his mouth” she said one of the liaison officers assigned to the programme informed her of a situation at Blue Waters Inn at Speyside where several employees had lost their jobs and were in need of food support.
“Farley didn’t call and ask for support so if a member of the Division could reach out and indicate that there was an overwhelming situation in his electoral district, I asked what was Farley doing at this point in time?”
Davidson- Celestine said she was on-site “to interact with the people and to ensure the system was churning out support to those in need.”
She said the people of Parlatuvier/L’ Anse Fourmi/Speyside must demand answers on why their needs were being neglected.