It’s been forty days and forty nights since acting governor general Errol Charles appealed to the nation from his House throne to unite in the common interest and to put aside squabbles and tempers. On the Tuesday morning of March 29, Mr. Charles reminded his local audience and others abroad that just over nine months earlier the electorate had asserted a new and decisive mandate that called for the reform of our laws, systems, policies, and processes to ensure good governance.
“We must learn from the past, including the folly of the past, lest we be cursed to repeat it,” read the acting governor general from his prepared script that ambitiously sought to gild Santayana’s lily. He said his government had pledged always to put the people first in its pursuit of bread, freedom and justice—an intoxicating mix of the incumbent party’s most recent campaign slogan and its oldest advertisement for itself.
“What we must achieve is a country where corruption is not tolerated,” said Charles, triggering, perhaps inadvertently, remembrances of a professionally inquisitive foreigner whose name at least half of the population would rather forget—and with whom we’ll soon get reacquainted. “A country that values its people and invests in their development, particularly their minds, bodies, and spirit. A country that is purpose driven. A country that pulls together. This cannot be a time for fighting ourselves. The self-hate of political tribalism, insularity and myopia has to end. We must break with the past.”
A quarter of a century before Charles, Kenny Anthony had good reason to prescribe a similar panacea, if with a slight twist: “Everywhere in this country there are signs of alienation, apathy and distrust. Policemen have lost their will to combat crime. Their faith in the rule of law has been shattered. Dangerous drugs have become the opiates of youth. Anger and dispossession have encouraged our young people to display the worst kinds of anti-social behavior. We must end the insensitivity, the confusion and the anger. To realize our hopes and dreams, we must come to terms with the past. It must no longer be allowed to haunt us. Hope must be returned to Saint Lucia.”
The year was 1996, in the month of May. Venue, the Laborie Boys’ Primary School. Occasion, the Labour Party’s 46th Annual Convention—when, as traitorously prearranged, Kenny Anthony was elected unopposed to deliver the Holy Grail that had eluded his predecessor Julian Hunte, at great personal cost to the businessman-politician.
To return to acting governor general Errol Charles’ Throne Speech with its oh so familiar ring: “We are living in a very unstable and uncertain social and economic world environment. The ravages of the COVID pandemic have exposed our economic and social vulnerabilities. The challenges we face are huge. We require a nation to work together leveraging the talents of its people for the good of all.”
The fall-out from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had affected the cost of energy, fuel and food, said Charles, as if revealing previously classified information. Then he arrived at what had been the new government’s most advertised campaign promise: punishment for identified individuals publicly accused by their political opposites of abusing their office to benefit friends, family and foreigners.
Yes, so it was hardly surprising that early in his speech acting governor general Errol Charles reassured the especially bloodthirsty among the congregation. “A matter which featured repeatedly on the minds of Saint Lucians during the run-up to the 2021 general elections was corruption,” he intoned. “Corruption creates waste and inefficiency in the delivery of vital services. It therefore must be stamped out of our public affairs with due haste and vigor. A government can have the best plans but if it does not govern well, if corruption abounds, every plan will be rotten inside. My government invites the nation to adopt a zero-tolerance approach to corruption.”
Twenty-four years earlier, in his own Throne Speech of 17 June 1997, this was how the day’s governor general addressed the plague: “Corruption has been identified as the number one issue on the minds of Saint Lucians. The extent of the public sentiment has found expression in popular culture, in calypsos such as Jaunty’s ‘Bobol List’ that expressed in no uncertain terms the revulsion that ordinary Saint Lucians felt at the abuse of public office for private gain . . . My government will, in conformity with the promises made during the election campaign, establish a commission to investigate all cases of alleged corruption and to establish which warrant further legal action and prosecution. We are resolute to pursue this course of action because the people have cried out for justice, and once a blind eye has been turned to corruption the institutional environment is created for its unchecked proliferation . . .”
The governor-general neglected to mention that what had turned the composer of ‘The Bobol List’ into an off-season carnival Pied Piper was his song’s chorus: I want to be on de bobol list/Somebody put me on de bobol list/Why can’t I be on de bobol list?/Somebody put me on de bobol list. So much for the cited wall-to-wall revulsion. According to Jaunty’s song, “ordinary Saint Lucians” could hardly wait for their own chance to hop aboard the corruption train!
In 1997 the governor general was Sir George Mallet. For over forty years he had served as deputy prime minister under John Compton, himself lead among the candidates to be interrogated and investigated by a one-member commission in the person of Englishman Sir Louis Blom-Cooper, our earlier referenced foreigner. In 1996, in the best interests of Vaughan Lewis, and at the behest of a beleaguered John Compton, Mallet was persuaded to hand over his then safe as houses Castries Central seat in exchange for a residency at Government House. If he lived to regret the decision, that secret was interred with George Mallet—unlike Compton, who in 2005 informed this writer during a televised pre-election interview that taking Lewis into politics at Mallet’s expense was his worst career move. Among his reasons: “Vaughan was never made for the cut and thrust of politics. He never learned the difference between opponent and enemy. I should not have required George Mallet to make so great a sacrifice. Vaughan Lewis simply was not worth it!”
Suffice it to say that while John Compton was eventually exonerated, and an apology in his behalf demanded in vain, Blom-Cooper confirmed a truth of nightmarish dimensions: “From the limited but not unrevealing perspective of the Commission of Inquiry I have discerned a culture in Saint Lucia of studied indifference or, at the very least, inattention to the practice, even the concept, of public accountability—a climate in which administrative torpor is often the consequence and malpractices in government, including corruption, can thrive, unhampered by detection or, if and when uncovered, by disciplinary action . . . The suspicion in the public’s mind that the machinery of government is not working, and consequently that corruption is rife, is almost as damaging to the public weal as individual corruption itself . . . Saint Lucians should be assured that failure and malpractices in government, once identified, will not go publicly unnoticed. A system of public accountability alone can ensure that!”
The acting governor general Errol Charles promised the new government will appoint a Special Prosecutor (an American construct) and enact appropriate legislation to permit investigations into public administration corruption. “It is my government’s intention” he assured his audience, “that these investigations will be completed before the life of this parliament.” (I am reminded at this point of a fiery exchange with Mr. George Theophilus, when he was Education Minister Hunter Francois’ permanent secretary. Yes, an eternity ago! I had written unflatteringly of the huge chasm between what the minister had said during a budget presentation and what he had delivered. An irate Theophilus had called my office at the Voice to defend his boss. Those were the days, when permanent secretaries cared! How well I remember his parting shot: “You, of all people, ought to know why what is said in the budget is little more than a declaration of intent. Not a promise carved in stone!”)
Meanwhile, there’s Prime Minister Philip J. Pierre’s Budget Policy Statement, delivered on Tuesday, 26 April, “a defining moment in my public-service life,” by his own measure. He kicked off by retracing the shaky steps that had taken him from humble beginnings as the son of a schoolteacher mother and her police officer husband. If among his audience there were some too young to know he was no newcomer to the peculiar game of Saint Lucian politics, that he’d been a top tier player for some 25 years, he soon set them right. “Putting the People First” was not just a campaign slogan, he said, it was also “a longstanding commitment of the St. Lucia Labour Party over the last 72 years.”
As for the government he was elected to lead on 26 July 2021, “it stands on the shoulders of those leaders in their call for bread, freedom and justice, which echoed in the halls of the trade union movement and gave birth in 1950 to the mother of all political parties in this country.” If in the revelation there was a hint of hyperbole, well, considering the occasion, who will bicker?
How revealing that more than a month after the acting governor general and the prime minister addressed the nation’s immediate and long-term future, there has been no meaningful public discussion of the latest “record budget.” The country has been preoccupied with partisan dickering at once senile and puerile, about how and why the Leader of the Opposition was twice in a row denied his right to speak, that he was out-foxed, prevented from making his contribution to the day’s debate, effectively gagged, unfairly treated, outmaneuvered by a complicit party brother in the Speaker’s chair and government MPs hell-bent on taking full advantage of their 15-2 House majority. Most popular was the view that “Allen Chastanet still imagines himself prime minister. He needed to be taught a lesson. He does not dictate the order of debaters in parliament.” Seldom are the rules that govern the House cited.
The prime minister offered his own sweetmeat to a fan in the colors of a particular media house: “If the voters required more opposition they would have elected more than just two MPs!” Obviously, the prime minister does not abide the “less is more” dictum. Ditto the Oscar Wilde who held that the only thing in the world worse than being talked about is not being talked about. Something to chew on: Could it be Allen Chastanet’s secret inspiration is P.T. Barnum, the legendary showman-politician for whom there is “no such thing as bad publicity?” On Wednesday evening the only item on every talk show’s menu was Coq au Chas. About the prime minister’s prescription for our ailing country, not a word, not a word, not one dissecting word!
(Look out for the next chapter on St Lucia’s latest ‘Record Budget!’)
