Emotional Duke vows to fight general elections

Wat­son Duke will hang up his boots as pres­i­dent of the Pub­lic Ser­vices’ As­so­ci­a­tion (PSA) at the end of No­vem­ber to go full time in­to pol­i­tics to cap­ture the To­ba­go East and West seats from the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM).

The an­nounce­ment was made yes­ter­day by Duke at a press con­fer­ence at the PSA’s head­quar­ters, Port-of-Spain. His an­nounce­ment brought him to tears.

Duke has been PSA’s pres­i­dent for a decade.

His com­ments came one week af­ter he was de­tained and charged by the po­lice for sedi­tion, aris­ing out of state­ments made last No­vem­ber.

Speak­ing for the first time since be­ing out on $250,000 bail, Duke de­scribed the po­lice’s at­tack as “a pleas­ant sur­prise.”

Dur­ing his de­ten­tion, Duke said his cell phone which con­tained his per­son­al bank­ing in­for­ma­tion, the union’s fi­nan­cial trans­ac­tions as well as “in­ti­mate pho­tographs” of he and his wife was con­fis­cat­ed by Spe­cial Branch of­fi­cers who re­quest­ed that he sur­ren­der his phone’s code which he re­fused, stat­ing that this was a vi­o­la­tion against his rights.