Out of curiosity my dear Prime Minister, how do you know that only 7% of the scholarship recipients were of East Indian descent? Did your government conduct a DNA examination of the scholarship recipients? I have many East Indian friends with non-seemingly East Indian names so I would hope that you did not base your accusation exclusively on the recipient's surnames. Is this the modus operandi of your government Mrs. Persad-Bissessar? Governance by eugenics and ethnicity? I noticed in your accusation you said "7% of the recipients were of East Indian descent and the other 93% were of non East Indian descent", perhaps you should clarify to both the population and Anil Roberts what you mean by "Non East Indian", because when you said it Anil Roberts was heard by the entire nation shouting over your voice asking, "not even a Dougla?". I would have thought that non East Indian would mean Afros, Douglas, Syrians, Chinese, Caucasian etc, but it seems Anil Roberts begs to differ.
Why were you only capable of giving a specific percentage of the East Indians that received scholarships but you couldn't tell the population how many Africans, Chinese, Syrians, Douglas and Caucasians were given scholarships? By deliberately withholding information on what ethnic group or groups made up the 93% I fail to understand your claims of racial discrimination. Also what does this mean of the 7% of East Indians who received scholarships? How were they able to secure scholarships from an alleged discriminatory government (according to you)? Did this 7% betray the larger East Indian community to secure these scholarships? Now that former Minister of Culture Ms Marlene Mc Donald has indicated in Parliament that it was a five member committee, two of which are of East Indian descent were the one's responsible for interviewing the scholarship awardees, is our Prime Minister indicating that these two citizens of East Indian descent aided and abetted the PNM in engaging in racial discrimination?
Apart from considering the recipient's ethnicity did you or your government contemplate any other reasons why they were selected? Are the person's selected from a particular economic stratum? Was the government offering scholarships for courses which it deemed priority? And while we are on the topic of the ethnic composition of tertiary education students, does this mean that the People's Partnership Government is going to launch an investigation into why so many of the persons admitted into the medical school at UWI are of East Indian descent? And last but not least, forgive me if I seem to be slow, but could you please explain to me of what relevance is the PNM's awarding of scholarships to the current $50b budget debate? How does the PNM awarding scholarships to only 7% East Indians bear any relevance to the fact that your government is about to once again embark upon deficit budgeting in what is the largest budget in the history of this country, and to date the citizens of this country still have not received a lucid explanation as to how your government intends to utilize this money. You do remember that this is a budget debate don't you?
