No Rowley for PNM Barataria meeting

Team Rowley rallied without its leader for a third straight political meeting ahead of the December 2 local government elections.

Finance Minister Colm Imbert told Thursday's meeting Rowley was down with the flu, but recovering well. Instead Imbert gave the feature address at the Barataria South Secondary School.

 Imbert was the last of four speakers, including Local Government Minister Kazim Hosein, Arts and Culture Minister Nyan Gadsby-Dolly and Minister in the Ministry of the Attorney General Fitzgerald Hinds.

 People's National Movement (PNM) public relations officer Laurel Lezama-Lee Sing, the MC for the night,  began by asking the  crowd to take local government elections seriously.

 The speakers who followed focused on listing what the government had delivered since 2015 and the defects of the United National Congress (UNC).

 Gadsby-Dolly, who spent a significant part of her contribution recalling her ministry's successful hosting of Carifesta in August, said the government had opened 30 community centres since 2015.

 "All of those the UNC left to grow moss in the PNM communities, we delivered all of those. There are 20 more community centres being worked on as we speak," Gadsby-Dolly said.

 As she called the names of the communities that benefited, Gadsby-Dolly repeated the mantra that the "PNM is getting the job done."

Hinds, a new deputy political leader of the party, told the audience they were fighting for the soul of the nation. 

"They want to change the character of this country. They want us to give up righteousness for wrongtiousness," Hinds said of the opposition party.

He said all the UNC had done was bring shame and disgrace to TT, recounting the controversy over the Lifesport programme and more recently the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which the UNC is alleged to have spied on and manipulated citizens before the 2010 general election.