Pembroke man tells THA: Set up 'working teams' on the ground

A Pembroke resident has suggested the THA should establish “working teams” in all Tobago's electoral districts to ensure programmes and initiatives are carried out.

Uriah Kirk, speaking on Tuesday at a town hall meeting for Belle Garden/Glamorgan residents at the Pembroke Community Centre, said Chief Secretary Farley Augustine and the other assemblymen cannot personally oversee all the projects in their respective areas.

He advised them to establish groups or reliable, competent people to do what ws needed.

Kirk told Augustine, “If you want this thing to work, each secretary, including you, must have working teams on the ground connected with you. When you come into a constituency, your team must be moving with you, properly dressed in a T-shirt, and they walking behind you supporting you. They can take your complaints and come to you.

"You don’t need to have so much hundred people coming. They going to kill you out.”

Kirk added, “You can have a chairman, secretary, assistant secretary to take notes and then you can come to see what is being done. You can’t go about keeping meeting all about the place and there is not a connection.

“At the end of the day, you go be out there whole day and in the night when you should be sleeping. Get a team behind you and let them help you out. That is the Bible principle….Those people going to kill you, and you know that too.”

He said he is willing to assist the THA in this regard.

Kirk, a retired foreman, also told Augustine the THA should not pay people who do not want to work.

He said in February 2022, his nephew had asked him to come up to Cardiff to see a piece of land.

Kirk said during the visit he noticed a drain near one of the homes was full of water.

“Is one year and that drain is still in that condition.”

He told Augustine, “Mr Chief Secretary, people is not working any more. The place in a mess. People will come and say they want work. But people don’t want work. Yuh have to get them to work or don’t pay them.”

To compound matters, Kirk said, a tree collapsed near the drain on Monday.

He criticised those who work only for a few hours in the morning.

“Let the people go out there and do their work…They work for half an hour and they back home not doing anything. Some of them in town with the people uniform.”