Street Vendors Have a Responsibility to All Customers

Francis Fonseca

Not lost in what transpired on Tuesday is the responsibility that each vendor has to ensure that the products and food items being sold at school are safe for human consumption.  From the police department’s perspective, Minister Kareem Musa reiterated that the Ministry of Home Affairs is committed to transparency when dealing with the issue of corrupt cops.

Francis Fonseca, Minister of Education

“You have a special responsibility as a vendor to ensure that the product you are selling to them is safe.  So I don‘t want us to lose that element of it at all.  It‘s a very important question.  That element of responsibility that lies with the persons selling the product, just like when we go to any store as adults, we go to any store and we pay our money for a product, we expect that we will get what we’re paying for.”

Kareem Musa, Minister of Home Affairs

“I think what you are seeing now, more than anything else over the last two and a half years, is a transparency that you in the media are perhaps not use to.  We have made it abundantly clear from taking over the administration that there‘s a major culture shift within the department that we have to make, whether it‘s abuse, whether it‘s rogue officers, whether it‘s corruption, whether it‘s incompetence, we have a very hard line that we have taken and we have been very transparent with that and so nobody is a sacred cow, it doesn‘t matter what your title is or what your rank is, nobody is a sacred cow.  So if it is that we detect any particular wrongdoing by a police officer, we have been very swift against those officers.  And so, what you are seeing now is that culture shift, it‘s actually action being taken against rogue officers.”