Democratic Labour Party (DLP) candidate for St Thomas, Dr Rolerick Hinds is calling on Barbadians to ignore the Opposition’s continued criticism of the government.
“The Barbados Labour Party has only been criticising, we have not heard any new ideas, not one idea coming from them,” he stressed.
“Now they are talking about Integrity Legislation. As our Prime Minister pointed out, Anti-Corruption Legislation was on the books since 1929…We passed the law back in 2012, last step is for it to be proclaimed and they are making an issue because they don’t have any ideas; they don’t know what to do, so they are just criticising us.”
Dr Hinds was at the time addressing the DLP’s combined political meeting at Alexandra School Hall on Sunday night.
He told supporters that the Freundel Stuart Administration has been doing the best it can and has been performing well in these trying economic times.
“We need to ignore them and keep pressing on. The fact that we are still here after nine years, means that we have to be doing something right”.
“…We have a small open economy and we try to manage what little resources we have, so that we can produce what we can, and we can earn the foreign exchange to continue to buy what we need,” he pointed out.
“We can say that we have trying times and at the end of it we are still here, and we are fighting strong. There is no saying that the crisis is over – we still see a lot of country struggling, for example Greece, who is finding it hard to borrow from banks and various countries have got themselves out and operating back to normalcy, but we are here struggling, and we are doing better than our counterparts in the Caribbean despite the naysayers who say not”.
Noting that the Opposition in its 14 years in government did nothing about the deteriorating roads in St Thomas, he highlighted that the Democratic Labour Party has widened the road and a built sidewalk in the vicinity of Holy Innocents Primary School making the area comfortable for traffic to flow easily via Ashford right up to Harrison’s Cave, as well as undertaken repairs along Jack-the-Box Gully, and making travel easier from Hight 2A onto Melrose onto Author Seat, etc.
“Also, we have recently finished and are about to open the police station in Cane Garden...We have made it necessary to make sure that the people of St Thomas are serviced with a police station”.
The DLP Candidate also described the BLP’s recent promise to reinstate free tuition to Barbadians attending the University of the West Indies (UWI) as “fluff”.
“Everyone seem to have forgotten that they shut down a school between 1994 and 2008. If you are not interested in the primary and secondary development of our people, how come you are ever so interested in the tertiary development. …And nothing says that they will maintain the numbers that we have in tertiary institutions in Barbados – saying that they will pay 100 percent, its just fluff and persons need to see through that…We just don’t want to cut programmes, we just said you will contribute to your education. Nowhere in the world will education be at the stage where it is 100 percent funding from the state,” he said. (TL)