The government chose to halve the workforce and double the life span of the EC$3 million (EC$1=US$0.37) replacement bridge at Colonarie.
Prime Minister Dr. Ralph Gonsalves, who said the bridge will be opened soon, told Parliament last week that his government had to chose between employing 30 people and a work crew of 15.
“But if we had employed 30 people, we would have had a project in the old fashioned way. You know, you do the boxing and you put the steel in it. So you [would have] had to have a lot of men to tie up the steel and so on. But that is what happened with the previous bridge, which was built by Ebenezer Joshua,” said Gonsalves, who is constituency representative for the area.
“But the bridge that we are building there now, because the slabs were put into heating chambers and made so strong and robust, the estimated lifespan is a hundred years,” Gonsalves further said.
“So I could have go[ne] and build one with 30 people which would last 50 years or 40 years, [or] build one with 15 and last a hundred years,” said Gonsalves, who is also Minister of Finance.
“There is nobody in Colonarie now, except for the child just born, and who would end up as a centenarian, [who] would have anything to do with repairing that bridge,” Gonsalves told Parliament.
The problem is when reading something written or spoken by a known liar, how much of it is true? When are they lying? when are they telling the truth? When you know someone is a liar, when someone tells you they sometimes tell lies, you can never again believe anything they say without external evidence.
None of us reading this article will be here in 100 years time, few of us will be here in 40 to 50 years. There can be no evidence of what he says, so we must dismiss it as rhetoric.
Choosing between 30 and 15 men just shows to us that Gonsalves is controlling everything, right down to employing people to build a bridge.
What he should do is start acting like a prime minister and stop acting like a mayor of a small town. He was mad as hell when he accused persons of not respecting him like they respect a British prime minister, problem is he is unable act like a 1st World prime minister for more than 10 minutes at a time. Perhaps it’s because he was born in a mauby shop, worked in a mauby shop and to this day the mauby shop mentality remains with him.
But then again, I suppose anything he can do or say, helps to take our minds off the Argyle fiasco. What prime minister in any country in the World would be talking about a bridge over a stream, its so paltry its laughable.
What is more I could of had the bridge completed in 12 weeks with ten men and appropriate machinery. How long is it now? coming up for two years?
Do we need to put our minds to this crap, there are more important things to debate and consider.