‘PNM made me cry like a baby’

“I CRIED like a baby,” admitted Fazal Karim, Opposition MP for Chaguanas East, in the height of his speech in the House of Representatives budget debate yesterday. He wept on being fired as National Training Agency CEO under the Patrick Manning-led People’s National Movement (PNM) government.

“You know what pains me? The person who is now Minister of Finance (Colm Imbert), he was my boss, he was minister of science, technology and tertiary education,” Karim told the House. Replying to a remark from Government Whip Camille Robinson-Regis, Karim said, “And they fired me too. The PNM fired me.

“Yes, I worked under the PNM and I kept my job until there was an instruction to fire me. But I’ll tell you what. When I was fired at ten to four on the Friday before Mother’s Day, I cried like a baby. To go home and tell me wife, ‘I can’t mind you any more.

“You know what my wife told me: she said, ‘greater things are in store for you’.” Declaring a testimony before the country, he thanked Kamla Persad-Bissessar for naming him as minister of tertiary education in her former government.

“When I went to the ministry, at that time located just south of Long Circular Mall, the permanent secretary came into the office and said, ‘Minister Karim, as a minister you can ask me to outfit your office, what do you want?’

“I said, ‘Permanent Secretary’, she’s now retired, nice lady, ‘you can change what you want, but that chair, don’t move that chair! That is the chair the minister fired me from! I want to sit on that chair’!”

Karim asked details of the Bespoke Tailoring Programme, run by a TT-born Savile Row (London) tailor, including its high cost and the means of choosing students for admission. He asked why the Trade Minister had spoken on it in this debate and not the Education Minister, and why it was moved from the University of Trinidad and Tobago to the MIC? “In my view there needs to be a full investigation into that programme.”

Karim later questioned Cabinet’s plans for a dry dock at La Brea for huge ships. “Do you have the equipment to handle these large vessels? You will be like you are in a bus-stop in La Brea and these large vessels are passing up and down and you are watching them.” Saying much groundwork must be done for such projects to be viable, Karim also asked what had happened to Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley’s plan for a $200 million plywood factory in La Brea.