Chaos In The Monkey House!

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]hose who hung around the chamber after Thursday’s House sitting broke for lunch could not have been prepared for what followed in the absence of new Speaker Andy Daniel. Some expressed shock and awe; others vomitous disgust. But then, the obvious question arises: What could’ve been so discombobulating about two local MPs going for each other’s jugulars in the main room of the nation’s best known house of ill repute? It’s not as if our honorable parliamentary representatives had ever been famous for their demonstrated special respect for the Speaker’s chair and the Mace, let alone for one another.  At any rate, not from the mid-70s!

House meetings in Saint Lucia have long been associated with sick comedy and simian characteristics, with bemused citizens looking on—like visitors to a zoo’s monkey section—as the Speaker appeals to deaf ears for order. Debating MPs have been known to leap over chairs and tables, like orangutans on steroids, while spewing stomach-turning expletives. One honorable member had famously threatened to “shoot from the hip and make shit” come out of another honorable member’s mouth.

One House Speaker was sent cowering to his office when it appeared to him he might discover himself presiding over bloody murder. He closed the particular meeting from a shelter a hundred yards from his chair. More recently, the then leader of the opposition effectively spat in the meticulously powdered face of a female House Speaker as she cried out uselessly for alleged honorable gentlemen to behave like real gentlemen. Prancing MPs ignored her appeals to take their chairs. A few noisily stormed out of the chamber, shouting obscenities in their wake. Others stopped near the Speaker’s chair just long enough to declare their seated colleagues “renegades, criminals, money launderers.”

This was how a House session ended on 11 January 1982:

Speaker: We have an adjournment of this House until 11.30 a.m.

MP: No, no sir, we are not adjourning until 11.30. We are adjourning this House in order that you could seek legal advice from the governor general, so that he can seek legal advice on this constitutional matter. It’s as simple as that, Mr. Speaker.

Another MP: We stand on that point in support.

Speaker: This House is adjourned until 11.30 a.m.

MP: The chair cannot, is not, entitled to move motions!

Speaker: I can adjourn the House at any time I want.

MP: You can suspend the sitting but you cannot adjourn the House. You’re not entitled. Read the Standing Orders.

The preceding is recorded in Hansard, as is what followed, described by the House diarist: “Interruptions . . . interruptions . . . pandemonium . . . At this point in time there is great disorder and general chaos with plenty blowing of whistles in the House of Assembly. The Mace is snatched from the sergeant-at-arms and thrown around the chamber. The sergeant-at-arms tries to retrieve the Mace. During this display of disrespect the prime minister and members of the government benches leave the chamber. After a great degree of difficulty the Mace is retrieved and the Speaker leaves the chamber, preceded by the sergeant-at-arms, bearing the Mace. The House is adjourned in this chaotic fashion at 10.58 a.m. . . . At 11.25 a.m. the clerk re-enters the chamber and announces on instructions from the prime minister that the House is adjourned sine die.”

And so we return to Thursday’s House debacle. It can hardly be classified information that the member for East Castries and his Southeast Castries counterpart are separated by an ocean of churning odium. From all that has been heard from the mouths of the MPs Philip J. Pierre and Guy Joseph, the latter is convinced that the former was part of a secret conspiracy to dig up enough Guy dirt as could land him behind bars for a long, long time. Guy Joseph has complained on countless occasions that Mr Pierre’s party continuously accuses him of being less interested in nation building than in the advancement of friends and relatives at government expense. Some supporters of Pierre’s party have recklessly abandoned innuendo and resorted to calling a spade a spade and what they perceive to be a crook, a crook.

Since taking office on 6 June 2016 the Southeast Castries MP has on numerous occasions revealed that the Kenny Anthony administration, including Philip J. Pierre, had hush-hush paid out of the Consolidated Fund to an American agency “over three million dollars” to investigate Joseph’s official and unofficial activities going back several years. There has so far been no comment on Joseph’s assertions that he was the target of a secret investigation that involved unauthorized phone-tapping. During Thursday evening’s debate, after Guy Joseph had yet again spilled details of the alleged investigation, Pierre stood up and denied having launched or participated in what the Southeast Castries MP had described. If he spoke truth, it would nevertheless not be the first time his government had engaged in controversial dealings with foreigners
without Pierre’s knowledge . . . But I am ahead of myself.
Let us return to lunchtime Thursday!

Although NTN viewers, including this writer, saw only a few seconds of the live action (the cameras are normally turned off once the Speaker has left the chamber) there were, as earlier stated, eyewitnesses, one of whom supplied blow-by-blow commentary, alas not fit to print here. Suffice it to say the Castries East MP let his Southeast Castries colleague and their open-mouthed audience know “the FBI coming for you!” Almost word for word the heads-up that a doubtless grateful Richard Frederick had received from the Kenny Anthony administration in an earlier time, later followed by better days.

For some, at any rate!