Rowley’s poor leadership

GARY GRIFFITH

via e-mail

AFTER FIRST declaring TT has no role to play as mediators in the dispute between Guyana and Venezuela, going as far as to tell the opposition UNC to "shut up," because of their call for TT to be mediators in the conflict, Prime Minister Rowley, in trying to save face, embarrassingly is attending the meeting between the two countries which was brokered by St Vincent and the Grenadines Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves.

Just the tip of the iceberg of his incompetence, he continues to ignore the potential implications for TT as well, which requires a clear, direct and robust form of readiness to shore up our own national security parameters.

As Prime Minister and as chair of the National Security Council (NSC), which he has a fondness for boasting about, I would expect precise measures to be put in place to ensure our own sense of security, such as:

Alert state

In this crisis that is developing, there is something called an alert state. An alert state means that you put in some degree of a systematic approach to ensure co-ordination, monitoring, because today it is Guyana, tomorrow it could be us. This alert state moves from green to amber to red to black, based on the escalation of the threat, which will guide both the various arms of the protective services, as well as the population, to know what needs to be done, how it needs to be done, and when it needs to be done.

That is how you prepare for armed conflict internationally. And while we must continue to hope and pray for the best, we must plan for the worst.

National Operations Centre

The centre was designed, built and manned by the last administration, of which I was a part. The NOC came as result of the commission of enquiry into the 1990 attempted coup, which stated that we must have a NOC to ensure all arms of the protective services could be mobilised, operating together, being on the same page, sharing intelligence, to have a unified operational plan.

This is clearly not the case in any form or fashion for some time now, which is why when the Defence Force was needed during the 2020 covid19 pandemic as a group of 150 men were descending on Port of Spain, with the intent to destroy the capital, similar to what took place during the 1990 attempted coup, they were held on standby and were never deployed to help quell the riots, which thankfully was dealt with swiftly by the actions of a trained and prepared TTPS.

The proper structure of a NOC is about monitoring our borders, getting joint intelligence gathering between different arms of the protective services, having representatives from the protective services, each of them being in that operation centre. This is to ensure that one hand will know what the other is doing to have intelligence-led operations.

A fully functional, staffed and cohesive NOC is an imperative to provide any form of effective state of readiness. Unfortunately, this was stripped, removed and debilitated.

These challenging diplomatic relationships can be terse and tense. However they are not insurmountable. I recall, when I sat as minister of national security, for decades before there was constant confrontation with the Guardia Nacional, Venezuela’s version of our Coast Guard, and TT fishermen.

Understanding I could not just sit back and allow our citizens to be bullied, I formed a bilateral agreement between our country and Venezuela, and after that the Guardia Nacional never once decided to intrude into our waters again because I utilised diplomacy and strategy to influence Venezuela to ensure that the Guardia Nacional would not abuse our fishermen.

How I also dealt with the situation was to ensure we had proper resources for our Coast Guard to protect our fishermen should an incident occur, hence we acquired six Damen vessels, which are used in over 17 other countries, at the cost of $1.2 billion less than the three OPVs purchased by the PNM government.

This Rowley-led government, unfortunately, let the vessels rot for eight years and only recently in the last budget, read in Parliament a few months ago, they promised to refurbish the Damen vessels to use – an admission of them being wrong for the eight years.

No aviation assets

Similarly, our Air Guard has no aircraft or helicopters, thanks to the incompetence and short-sightedness of Rowley.

The reality is that we are caught in the middle, on the very precipice of the potential for further conflict between Venezuela and Guyana. And as such I ask each and every member of the public, regardless of your political affiliation, to call upon Rowley as NSC chair to step up and advise on the clear actions being taken to shore up TT’s security networks. And if he’s unable to adhere to his obligations, then he should step down.