PM alleges inducements sought before ZOSO vote

Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar says a se­nior Gov­ern­ment sen­a­tor was ap­proached by two In­de­pen­dent Sen­a­tors be­fore the vote on the Zones of Spe­cial Op­er­a­tions (ZOSO) Bill on Tues­day. The Bill failed in the Sen­ate with eight vot­ing against the Bill while Sen­a­tor Court­ney Mc­Nish ab­stained.

In a pub­lic state­ment is­sued af­ter the Sen­ate vote, Per­sad-Bisses­sar said she an­tic­i­pat­ed op­po­si­tion from the Pres­i­dent’s ap­point­ed Sen­a­tors and claimed that at­tempts were made to trade sup­port for per­son­al favours. She said those re­quests were re­fused and that, from that point, it be­came clear the Bill would fail.

“My Gov­ern­ment will not buy votes,” the Prime Min­is­ter stat­ed, adding that those in­volved “know who they are” and must ac­cept re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for their ac­tions.

Per­sad-Bisses­sar said the pro­posed ZOSO leg­is­la­tion was in­tend­ed to lim­it and re­place the use of States of Emer­gency, ar­gu­ing that her ad­min­is­tra­tion was seek­ing to re­duce, rather than ex­pand, ex­ec­u­tive pow­ers avail­able to the State. She main­tained that an SOE could have been de­clared in­stead, but that the Gov­ern­ment chose a leg­isla­tive route to con­strain those pow­ers.

She al­so crit­i­cised the Op­po­si­tion Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment and its sup­port­ers, ac­cus­ing them of mis­un­der­stand­ing the im­pli­ca­tions of the Bill and cel­e­brat­ing an out­come that, she said, weak­ened ef­forts to re­form na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty pol­i­cy.

The Prime Min­is­ter linked crime and vi­o­lence trends to po­lit­i­cal de­ci­sion-mak­ing, stat­ing that most mur­der vic­tims over the past decade were young Afro-Trinida­di­an men and that many com­mu­ni­ties af­fect­ed by gang vi­o­lence were Afro-dom­i­nat­ed ar­eas with­in PNM con­stituen­cies. She ac­cused the Op­po­si­tion of ob­struct­ing se­cu­ri­ty mea­sures and al­leged links be­tween po­lit­i­cal in­ter­ests and crim­i­nal fi­nanciers.

Per­sad-Bisses­sar cit­ed crime fig­ures from 2015 to 2025, claim­ing more than 124,000 crimes were record­ed dur­ing that pe­ri­od, in­clud­ing about 5,000 mur­ders and near­ly 9,000 rapes and sex­u­al as­saults, which she at­trib­uted to gov­er­nance un­der the PNM.

She said her Gov­ern­ment and the se­cu­ri­ty ser­vices re­mained com­mit­ted to re­duc­ing crime and im­prov­ing pub­lic safe­ty, with sup­port from law-abid­ing cit­i­zens, and pledged that ef­forts to re­form na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty pol­i­cy would con­tin­ue de­spite op­po­si­tion.