George Odlum: A Visionary in the Land that Will Not See!

For all right judgment of any man or thing,” observed Thomas Carlyle, “it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing his bad.” George Odlum was a politician, and for most of his life had suffered the slings and arrows of fellow politicians and other fair-weather friends who painted him in the demonic colors of a Papa Jab. Not that he did not strike back. Consider the following:  

There is something in the psyche of the government which refuses to face the reality of things. If you’ve been paying attention to the debate today, it is like a mutual admiration society. No deep analysis, no seriousness of concern. You have people talking about how many light bulbs,  they placed here and there. Not so much about infrastructure, just about light bulbs. It is a phenomenon of New Labour: beat your chest and boast. For this government, everything is a first. If they borrow money from a bank, then they boast that it’s the first time the bank has lent out so much. If they open a small project in a village, they boast about it being the first in the Eastern Caribbean. That’s a weakness. In this time of integration, when people are trying to bring together the Eastern Caribbean and CARICOM, why the need to sound like you’re better than the rest? There is no need to go about beating your own chest; let the people do that for you. The little things we do in our constituencies, when we replace a bulb here and there, that’s the very least of what’s expected of us. That minister over there, I have worked closely with him. But I do not like his fixation with his opponents. You must not repeat the victimization you may have experienced. I, too, have suffered victimization. This government’s attitude must change.  

Don’t beh-leh-lesh the people. Just do your work. Do it seriously and continuously. I acknowledge there must be public relations, but not the falsehoods spread around by your spin doctors. They are doing this government more harm than good. You must hear them on the radio. They have no sense of history. There are serious neuroses developing and these neuroses come from the paranoia of the government through the lips of its spin doctors. Meanwhile, the people are hungry. They have no money to pay for basic needs. Yet the government and its government’s spin doctors brag about how well our economy is doing, that the people have money to buy tickets to every fete, every party. There is at work here a reverse psychology the government does not understand. Those people attending fetes are trying to escape their depressing realities, if only for a few hours. Many have done things no self-respecting person would do to get the forty dollars needed for tickets to the fete. We must look at crime with this in mind. Tinkering here and there will never take this country out of the mess we’re in. That is why the prime minister must think seriously of uniting this country. Not further dividing us.

He recalled “a strange coincidence.” He had made a mental note to visit the prime minister a week following a party convention. He would’ve said: “Kenny, you hear me making my points here and there. You’ll hear a lot about a national government. Please don’t say a word about it. Let it pass; let it go. It might redound to the interest of your own party.” But the prime minister listened to his spin doctors who advised him to launch an attack at the convention at the R.C. Boys’ School, where he referred to “traitors in red shirts.”

Does moving from one party to another make a man a traitor? You, Mr. Prime Minister, you left the Labour Party. Not once, but twice. I did not call you a traitor. I saw you had things to do. Leaving the Labour Party to pursue other things did not make you a traitor. Other members here were with the United Workers Party before they joined Labour. So, what is this big thing about me being a traitor because I recoiled at what you have done to me? I know the history of psychosis. I know what happens in political parties before the chopper comes down. I got out. Before Armageddon reached me, I got out. I know I will have to face Armageddon. I realize I have a rendezvous with death at some disputed barricade. I know it. But I will go down with my honor, knowing that I stood up for what I believe is the right thing for this country. No one need challenge me on this. From 1987, I have been expressing the view that political parties alone, politics alone, cannot save this country. There must be a new healing; a new spirituality. There must be a new approach to the problems.

We cannot resolve the crime problem if we keep eating each other up, party against party. We cannot solve the unemployment problem unless we get the productive talents of the country to come together. I want you to understand that unemployment, crime, drugs, these are things that outstrip the capacity of the United Workers Party and the St. Lucia Labour Party. We don’t have the talent. We have not got the political will. We have to take our best talents and bring them together, regardless of where they came from. If they come from the private sector; if they come from other parties, or no parties, we must take them. We must use the collective resources and talents of this country in order to get a solution for all the people of this country.

He reminded his House colleagues that he had never taken Saint Lucia in “a direction that is evil,” a direction that Satan—the name recently bestowed upon him by his former Labour brethren—might take them. Everything he had done, he said, he had put his neck on the line to achieve it. He had no quarrel with those who had relieved him of his Foreign Affairs portfolio. He had been “tremendously affected in this guava time” by the loss of his salary. But he considered the country’s future more important by far than his personal comforts. As for the matter being debated: “We have a budget. A lot of figures have been thrown around, some of that unnecessary. But New Labour governments use figures like a drunk uses a lamppost—for the support, rather than the illumination.”

I have always believed in the magnanimity of giving Jack his jacket. I hear you speak about the lights we have put up. I hear you speak about the improvements we make all along the way. But we are never generous enough to say that the man who went before us had laid the infrastructure. He created Rodney Bay. You must be man enough to admit it. I hope in thirty years you’ll have a slate like his to show off, Mr. Minister. You’ll still be around, have no fear. Only those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. I do not believe you’re mad or about to be destroyed. I’m the one facing Armageddon, not you. I am the one. You must have that generosity of spirit, that magnanimity of soul, to be able to say: ‘Other men have worked.’ Only under Labour, you say? That is partisan. That is nonsense. You must have that generosity of spirit. And if it’s not there, then you must inculcate it. We cannot have people divided, tearing at each other. We must bring them together. This was our promise. It was our promise to bring our people together in unity. Mr. Speaker, in our quiet moments we must appreciate the hopelessness of turning this country around. I think about it at night before I fall asleep: How can we turn this country around unless we remove these divisions. We have some additional work to do. And it is philosophical; it is psychological. It has to do with creating a new spirituality; a new feeling in this country, so that when a boy talks to a girl and she says no, he does not knife her. This is the opposite of what happens today. These are the types of crime we have in this blessed country. The boys knife the girls and the girls knife the boys. We have to work at changing our people, changing their thinking.”

He recalled the murderous attack on worshippers at the Castries cathedral some 90 days before the House session. He took some blame, he said. He had asked himself whether he’d been doing too much traveling abroad as the country’s foreign minister to touch base with the fringe elements of Saint Lucian society. He no longer had time to speak with them, to talk about their simplistic interpretation of the Bible.

Mr. Speaker, there is confusion in our country, and that is why this beh-leh-lesh budget cannot hit its target. Most of our people have a different impression of what is really happening economically. You say the economy is fine, and they say their pockets are empty. They say theysare hungry and you say that cannot be true. I say I am catching my royals and you point to your projects. This is arrogance, that we should say to the people you know better than they the miseries they confront daily. It is another level of deception to be able to manipulate figures so they say what you want them to say. If you follow the tenets of your own Contract of Faith, then you cannot victimize those with whom you may disagree. To victimize Saint Lucians who are not members of your party is barbaric!”

In his book entitled, At the Rainbow’s Edge, published in 2004, Prime Minister Kenny Anthony referenced a group that had come together to form a political party that they named The National Alliance. This is how Anthony described them: “The story of the Alliance is nothing more than the most sordid chapter in the history of exploitation of the sensitivity of the Saint Lucian masses. It is sad because it represented an attempt to perpetuate the greatest political fraud on Saint Lucians. This attempt was engineered by the Concerned Citizens. In other words, the Oligarchy. They are the most isolated, most backward, greediest elements of the Saint Lucian bourgeoise. These charlatans believe they alone have a divine right to rule and to control. They are those whose wealth and position are dependent, not on some special ability but on having the access and influence to make things happen their way. They are the Concerned Citizens. In Odlum they found a willing accomplice, a willing instrument of evil, so infected with prime ministeritis that he cannot distinguish between right and wrong.”

In April 2001, Prime Minister Kenny Anthony announced that he had informed the Governor General of George Odlum’s removal from his Cabinet and replaced him as foreign minister with Julian R. Hunte. In the early morning hours of September 28, 2003 George Odlum took his last breath. On the afternoon of October 6, at his funeral service in Mindoo Phillip Park, with some three thousand fellow mourners in attendance, the St. Vincent prime minister Ralph Gonsalves revealed he had visited the moribund Odlum just days before he expired.

 “I was at his hospital bed on the nights of September 23 and 25,” he said. “The first time I visited, nothing could’ve prepared me for what I saw. He was gaunt, emaciated, incredibly thin. Cancer is a truly debilitating disease. Yet, there was in George’s countenance a tranquility, a quiet calm and a transcendental dignity that put the shocked visitor at ease. His voice, though audible, was weak. Upon his sight of me, he smiled a wry smile and he said, ‘I can go home now. I have seen the last of the Mohicans.’ He was referring to the fact that after him I am the last of the traduced radicals.” Throughout the service, groups of mourners loudly blamed Kenny Anthony for almost every disaster that had befallen the deceased throughout his political life. There were countless references to Anthony’s betrayals, beginning with events related to the 1979 Labour government, at least as many variations of the legendary “briefcase episode,” as well as previously unheard of details of Odlum’s “unfair dismissal” as foreign minister.

As for his daughter Yasmin, who had cared for him in his final days at the Marigot home he’d named Valhalla, she said before a gathering in Derek Walcott Square: “I was closest to the private George Odlum, therefore in a position to know his last words were taken from a hymn. Those who came to see him will know he was always trying to pass on messages even when the ability to speak had left him. Imagine that: the orator who once moved crowds in ways never to be seen again in Saint Lucia now lost for words. Brother George died in Christ. All was well with his soul. When people tell you a country runs on economics, power, politics, intellect and name, tell them they lie. For without spiritual vision, the people perish.”

A nearby drunk and broken female mourner turned heckler said: “It was you. You killed your father.” Yasmin set her right: “No, madam, I did not kill my father. What killed my father was that he was near death yet could not see a spiritual redemption in this country. He died with tears in his eyes. He could barely speak when he whispered to me: ‘Yasmin, I made a mistake. I thought everything was about politics. But I was wrong. It’s about redeeming your country from the inside out. It’s about creating communities where people love one another, where political differences don’t divide us in a way that we cannot recognize we are all brothers and sisters, that we are responsible for one another.” But then, did he not speak similar words of redemption during his contribution to the 2001 Budget Debate? That his words had fallen on deaf ears is obvious—as obvious as the high price we continue to pay for our incorrigible mule-headedness!