/C driven by gov’t’s constitution after ce vote - Don Singh

that led him to the PPP.

“If, in January, they had said, ‘we will hit the ground running, hold elections and fight this thing at the polls,’ I would’ve been with them. I would’ve been with them. I couldn’t accept the delays and prevarication…. It’s fair play that’s all I want. You can’t defy the Constitution,” he stressed.

The sense of betrayal is clear in his voice as well as his refrain especially since he can’t be sure that the PPP has changed from being the party he worked so hard to remove from government.

So far, Singh is taking the chance to possibly be the change he wants to see and according to him, along the way, he and his ideas have been treated with respect.

“I’ve met the [PPP] Presidential Candidate [Irfaan Alli] and he’s listened to my ideas. I don’t get the impression they are being facetious. What they have said is ‘develop your ideas, put them in writing and we will add them to the manifesto,’” Singh related.

He noted that PPP members as well as members of the Civic component, with whom he has engaged, have assured him that once his ideas are in the manifesto, he doesn’t have to worry about implementation.

“At that point, they become a promise to the people and not to the Civic,” he shared.

The ideas he is so keen to pilot related directly to poverty alleviation through structured skills training.

“I want to use our playgrounds or recreations space for skills training. I want to turn them into hubs for apprenticeships and [possibly] offer a stipend for participants; rather than having them come to the technical schools when they might not be able to sustain that attendance, we go to them. I want to get you there, teach you a sport and a technical skill that you can use to develop a career. I want to make it as broad-based as possible. Teach plumbing and welding and weaving. You can’t get people out of poverty by giving them handouts but you can give them skills,” he explained. Behind the scenes While there has been no formal feasibility study on how this could be achieved,