Call to audit $378m given to Children's Authority

OPPOSITION senator David Nakhid says the Prime Minister and the line minister for the Children's Authority have to explain the recent escape of five boys from its supervision, especially after revelations in Parliament that $378 million was spent on the authority over four years.

Nakhid was speaking at the United National Congress's Monday night VIrtual Report, with a focus on the two boys, Antonio Francois and Semion Daniel, both 15, who were killed on March 28. That was just over a week after they and three others escaped from a safe house in north Trinidad.

Children's Authority director Nichola Harvey-Mitchell blamed a security lapse for the incident, but told Newsday, "I would not say the authority failed the boys."

Nakhid said both the Prime Minister and Ayanna Webster-Roy have to take responsibility for the failures of the CA, as it falls under the Office of the Prime Minister.

Rowley, he said, "couldn't find one flimsy minute to talk about these (murdered) boys" and while Webster-Roy gave "just an offering" in Parliament, Nakhid suggested she was wrong to suggest the boys were gang members.

"How could Ayanna Webster-Roy, who is the Minister of Child and Gender Affairs, make that connection between the killing of these boys and gangs? There's none," Nakhid charged. "No one until now can say with any certainty that this has anything to do with gangs.

"In fact, we've heard differently. I've heard, going up on the hill four times in the last ten days, that these boys were pimped out."

Nakhid said, "I'll tell you why she did that. It's not about these two children of the nation killed, murdered, slaughtered prematurely, not even reaching the prime of their lives. It's about the People's National Movement protecting their interests. Why?"

He criticised the PNM's apparent indifference to the issue of the state's renting properties belonging to the Attorney General's family.

"So Ayanna Webster-Roy stated in Parliament that $378 million had been given to the Children's Authority since 2016.

"Well, as of February 28, 2021, 957 children were in the care of the Children's Authority, working out to about $80,000 per year per child. So where did that money go? Eighty thousand per year, and that's what we get, two young boys gunned down."

"We have to ask and we have to call for a forensic audit of this Children's Authority. That must be done to determine – that $378 million, where has it gone between 2016 and 2020?"