Manning stands firm: No fetes in the stadium

Prime Minister Patrick Manning is standing firm on his government's decision not to allow fetes at Trinidad and Tobago's main sporting facilities.

Sports Minister Gary Hunt has told fete promoters he will not allow them to use the facilities for cultural shows and fetes because he doesn't want to expose the infrastructure "to usage that would be severely detrimental to...sporting requirements."

According to Hunt, "People jumping up in gay abandon is certainly not the way that you preserve the highly specialised sporting fields and indoor tracks, which are amenable to contrasting multipurpose use."

Speaking with reporters Wednesday in San Fernando, Manning was adamant that the decision is the right one and that he stands behind Hunt, noting that those who are objecting to the decision are business people who make money from the shows.

He suggested that they build their own and leave the state’s facilities for the people.

commenting on critics of the decision, Manning said, "The people who are saying that are businessmen and these people are promoters who make money off it. Why don’t they build their own facility?"

He added that the very people who used the facilities last year are the ones to blame for the government ban.

"It is the last time I will do that because of the condition they left it. We warned them ’if you don’t leave it in a proper condition, you not going to get it again’. And that is exactly what they did," Manning said.

"There is a tendency in this country that the Government must do everything so that people can maximise their profits at the expense of the citizen, and that is something that we cannot encourage," the prime minister declared.