GAIL ALEXAN­DER

There won’t be any Com­mon­wealth ob­servers com­ing for Trinidad and To­ba­go’s Gen­er­al Elec­tion on Au­gust 10 – but there's the pos­si­bil­i­ty of Cari­com ob­servers, Prime Min­is­ter Kei­th Row­ley in­di­cat­ed on Fri­day night.

Row­ley was re­ply­ing to a query about the ob­servers dur­ing the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment’s “Fri­day Night Vir­tu­al Lime with Dr Row­ley” pre­sen­ta­tion, spot­light­ing Row­ley.

Op­po­si­tion Leader Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar had writ­ten to him re­cent­ly ask­ing for elec­tion ob­servers from var­i­ous fo­rums, in­clud­ing the Com­mon­wealth, Cari­com and Carter Cen­tre. Row­ley im­me­di­ate­ly fired off let­ters to the Com­mon­wealth and Cari­com re­quest­ing del­e­ga­tions.

Per­sad-Bisses­sar again raised the is­sue on Fri­day, not­ing the elec­tion was just over two weeks away and point­ing out the ob­servers would need to get in­to T&T by this week­end to un­der­go the manda­to­ry quar­an­tine and get out in time to ob­serve the elec­tion.

But on Fri­day dur­ing the Face­book live event, the PM said the Com­mon­wealth had replied say­ing they didn’t think they would be able to come be­cause of the cost. He not­ed that quar­an­ti­ning a del­e­ga­tion for the re­quired two-week pe­ri­od in­volved costs. It was al­so dif­fi­cult to get to T&T since there are no com­mer­cial flights cur­rent­ly due to the lock­down of the bor­ders due to COVID-19 re­stric­tions. Since they hadn’t ar­rived by Fri­day, he said, “We may not have a Com­mon­wealth team.”

He said Gov­ern­ment couldn’t even say it could as­sist in bring­ing in the team in the event they did a favourable re­port and then the PNM might be ac­cused of pay­ing for the team. “We’re not do­ing that …,” he said.

He said Gov­ern­ment thought it could ask a third par­ty to as­sist the team and is talk­ing to some, but hasn’t got­ten an an­swer. He said if the Com­mon­wealth team had to get here, that should have been by this Fri­day, in or­der to com­plete a two-week quar­an­tine and be able to move around for elec­tion day.

But he didn’t think they could come lat­er “un­less they sit in a room and mon­i­tor us on TV”.

Row­ley said Gov­ern­ment al­so in­vit­ed Cari­com ob­servers and Cari­com’s sec­re­tari­at said three coun­tries had agreed to pro­vide a team.

“So we’re wait­ing to hear what that means. The sec­re­tari­at will now ask each coun­try to send a rep­re­sen­ta­tive,” Row­ley said.

How­ev­er, he said the Cari­com team will al­so have to get here by this week­end. But he said if T&T doesn’t get them, “We’re no ba­nana re­pub­lic and over­ly trou­ble­some – we con­duct our­selves. Un­less some­one in­tends to mis­be­have,”

But Row­ley said he’d have liked ob­servers to be here to see what they do, ad­mit­ting that "some­times they make in­ter­est­ing com­ments if you have to make ad­just­ments”.