On Tuesday, the no confidence motion tabled in Grenada’s House of Parliament by the opposition New National Party (NNP) was debated and ultimately defeated.
In debating the motion, opposition leader Dr Keith Mitchell castigated the leadership of Prime Minster Tillman Thomas and the state of political and economic uncertainty in the country.
In response, lead government spokesman, Minister of Youth Empowerment Patrick Simmonds, offered a compilation of statistics that outlined the achievements of the administration.
Finance Minister Nazim Burke described the NNP motion as “political opportunism”.
Former Minister of the Environment, Michael Church, who was an early casualty of the Thomas administration, pointed to the suffering and victimization of his constituents who should have benefitted from development initiatives that had been approved for his constituency of St John, which he won in 2008 on an NDC ticket, but had been put on hold since his resignation from the Thomas Cabinet.
Church cited a fish plant built by the Japanese in 2009 but has remained shut. NDC promises of housing rehabilitation have been ignored since he demitted Cabinet, he said. He reiterated that his constituents deserved much better and the recalcitrance of Burke and Thomas led him to support the no-confidence motion.
Government ministers Lett, Quarless, Burke and former tourism minister Peter David all spoke against the motion. Like Simmonds, the three government ministers read out a stack of statistical information that attempted to tell Grenadians that, although the infighting was evident, government was full speed ahead with work attending to the nation’s business.
David’s contribution to the debate attracted great attention in that it clarified two critical speculations: David and Mitchell were not collaborative partners in the NNP-introduced motion and David remains a firm member of the NDC but gave clear warning to Thomas that he will be challenged at a future party congress.
