We may as well begin with some pearls lifted from a James Baldwin essay entitled An Open Letter to my Sister, Miss Angela Davis, originally published in a 1970 edition of The New York Review of Books: “One way of gauging a nation’s health, or of discerning what it really considers to be its interests, is to examine those people it elects to represent or protect it.”
“Politics is not a game. It is an extremely serious thing,” writes the same author in A Talk to Teachers: And then there’s this: “People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead, turns himself into a monster.”
But enough from the revered author and American Civil Rights giant. Let us now turn our attention to one of our own, with whose oeuvre we should be at least as familiar as, say Yardie’s or Andre Paul’s, but incredibly are not. Standing on bales of bitter experience, Arthur Lewis cautions: “Political leaders, like businessmen, are motivated by the desire for money, power and prestige, as well as the desire to serve.” Moreover: “A political system that depends on the altruism of politicians would be just as much an absurdity as an economic system that depends on the altruism of businessmen.”
Not all politicians are created equal. Their motivations can be grouped under four headings, Lewis suggests: Love of power and its material rewards. Conviction that opposition politicians are dangerous. Conviction that opposition tactics weaken the efficiency of the state. And lastly, ideological conviction that an elite political party is the supreme instrument of society.
Much of the above was gleaned from Lewis’ book Politics in West Africa, but his words also ring bells at home in Saint Lucia, as well as in our sister islands. Lewis is, after all, the author of the long out of print, controversial, often quoted pamphlet The Agony of the Little Eight, wherein he states, in surprisingly strong terms, what he believed had torpedoed his dream of a West Indies Federation, “the only way that good government can be assured to their peoples.”
Lewis had played a crucial intellectual and advisory role in the associated negotiations, to small avail. In his booklet he recalls a point when “practically all of the close associates of Dr. Eric Williams were fed up to the teeth with the small-island leaders, wanted to have no more to do with them, were urging that Trinidad should go on to independence alone.”
Lewis blamed this sad state of affairs on a decision he had taken that proved a mistake. “As head of the University College,” he elaborated, “I had kept scrupulously out of politics, had played no part in the federal wrangle, and so did not know how deep were the hatreds.”
It would come as no surprise to this writer if many of you now reading me should dismiss as hyperbole what in the Sixties had so discombobulated Lewis—by reputation of fine pedigree, a gentle, modest man of integrity—accustomed as we have become to what now passes for debates among the honorable gentlemen of our own parliament.
If in the time of Arthur Lewis, the Sixties, the “hatreds” among political leaders equaled the depth of a Jeremie Street puddle, today they run deep enough to accommodate suicidal barking dogs. We need not at this juncture consider the consequential damage to the collective Saint Lucian psyche. The hatred that conceivably had sank the dream of federation had two decades later also engulfed what was promoted in Saint Lucia by the UWP’s John Compton as the OECS Unity Initiative and opposed as “merely jobs for the boys” by the SLP’s Julian Hunte and fellow members of the Standing Conference of Popular Democratic Parties of the Eastern Caribbean (SCOPE—which acronym prompted Compton to say it was painfully obvious the group was in need of a more effective mouthwash!)
Speaking of John Compton: In his televised final interview he shared with the nation that one of the few regrets of his forty-something-years career was that he had brought into politics the son of Sir Arthur’s departed brother Allen, once our nation’s governor-general, another casualty of “the hatreds.” Vaughan Lewis was at heart an ambitious academic, an unusually emotional Compton implied, never cut out for politics. “He was thin-skinned. He never appreciated the difference between opponent and enemy. Once you disagreed with him, he saw you only as a detractor. The enemy!”
(Incidentally, Vaughan’s Uncle Arthur identified Compton as one of the villains in The Little Eight tragedy. His impossible demands on the other political leaders after he replaced George Charles as Saint Lucia’s chief minister following the 1964 elections was as a mortal wound to the federal negotiations. Rest assured Compton was at the forefront of his mind when Arthur Lewis predicted that “ultimately West Indians will come together again in political association, but only after the present generation of leaders is dead!” As it turned out, another miscalculation by the Nobel winner for Economics. A long time ago Errol Barrow, John Compton, Norman Manley, Vere Bird journeyed to that widely presumed better place in the sky.
We come now to one of the present generation’s leaders: Philip J. Pierre, who has good reason to believe he may be his country’s best loved politician. By which I mean to say that although his predecessors—Compton and Kenny Anthony included—may all have enjoyed varying levels of popularity—or its evil twin notoriety—when it comes to Pierre the devotion publicly showered upon him from sources, obvious and unexpected, transcends mere adulation. Space does not permit me on this occasion to retrace his steps through the snake-infested jungle that is local politics, tentative steps that had brought him from relative obscurity to the position of deputy leader of the St. Lucia Labour Party in the time of Julian Hunte, deputy leader and deputy prime minister under Kenny Anthony, and more recently to the top of Mt. Olympus—home of the gods. Suffice it to say his elevation had not come cheap. Neither did it arrive overnight. It had cost him more than half a lifetime, with more downs than ups. In 1997 it had taken several heated arguments before the broke SLP’s brass were convinced it might be worth investing in a return bout between Pierre and the presumed invincible Romanus Lansiquot. In the 1992 electoral match the UWP candidate won by a knockout 1092 votes!
It is local legend that not only did the Labour Party win 16 of the 17 seats in the 1997 elections but that Philip J. Pierre had emerged the recipient of the most votes cast for a single candidate, in the process sending Lansiquot into retirement. As for his down moments, it is hardly common knowledge that having taken over the leadership of his party following its 2016 electoral defeat under Kenny Anthony—and with a 2021 victory in plain sight—a nevertheless downcast and overworked Pierre had successfully wrestled several taxing rounds with a demonic temptation to throw in the towel.
When he was still new to the mined field of local politics, Pierre had learned from a long-time friend a lesson he never forgot. And it was that the best politicians seldom decorate newspaper covers. Forever on the prowl for stories that sell newspapers, reporters consider boring, such politicians as are reluctant to engage them in petty gossip unrelated to their constituencies. Stories about clogged drains, electricity supplies, scarcity of jobs and such do not sell. At any rate not nearly in the numbers that scandals do. Which may explain Pierre’s sometimes confusing, ambivalent relationship with local journalists.
He has often been described as dismissive, suspicious, and disrespectful bordering on contemptuous of reporters. Remember his curt response when Dale Elliott asked whether he had personally read the IMPACS report? “None of your business,” was Pierre’s repeated cold response. When the dearly departed beloved Lissa Joseph prefaced a question during a televised presser with the following reminder: “Prime Minister, on many, many, many occasions you said . . .” a stone-faced Pierre interrupted: “Just one many, Lissa!”
The room roared. Doubtless Pierre had inadvertently brought to mind Donald Trump’s famous interruption of Megyn Kelly during his first presidential debate, when Kelly accused him of being disrespectful to women: “You call them fat, you call them pigs, slobs and . . .” Trump raised a protesting forefinger. “Only Rosie O’donnell,” he said. “Only Rosie O’donnell.”
We need not repeat his unforgettable gaffes. Pierre’s, that is. It is enough to say that while they afforded his opponents much amusement, they had also contributed to Pierre’s regular-guy image. Some may well say his constituents flatter themselves when they claim, mostly defensively, that their parliamentary representative is made in their image. That he’s one of them, a straight shooter, imperfect perhaps, but human, without airs and pretensions, never condescending. What matters more is that in the eyes of Pierre’s constituents, he is next to infallible. Who cares if not everyone agrees?
Indeed, following the Labour Party’s 13-seat election victory in 2021, there was much resentment, even among his inner circle, however muted, when Pierre went where no prime minister had gone before: he invited to join his Cabinet, Stephenson King as well as the incorrigibly controversial vote influencer Richard Frederick. It will be remembered that both had contested the election under their own respective colors, having earlier been ejected from the United Workers Party.
If only for the purposes of record, let us now revisit recent history, with Pierre at the helm of Saint Lucia’s Ship of State. Even his detractors will admit, if only away from ubiquitous cellphones, cameras and other recording devices, that in his circumstances he had done a fine job navigating angry economic weather, and sustained gale force opposition winds that often threatened to sweep him and his crew off course. Especially worrisome was Category 5 Hurricane Crime, not forgetting the CIP earthquake whose aftershocks continue even as I write to shiver the timbers of more than a few of this treasure island’s Long John Silvers.
His years as a ridiculed, seemingly under-appreciated loyal follower and perennial Kenny Anthony deputy had paid off. Not to be underestimated was that he had managed some of the more vital ministerial portfolios in the Kenny Anthony years—among them Tourism, Commerce, Utilities and Financial Services. His eve of election self-advertisement in which he claimed to be “the most readied candidate for the job of Prime Minister of Saint Lucia” proved not nearly as hollow as at first hearing.
If many readily had credited the “independent candidate” Richard Frederick with winning the 2021 elections for the Saint Lucia Labour Party, the prevailing consensus is that in 2025 Philip Pierre singlehandedly tracked down and seized the Golden Fleece for his party. Some have gone so far as to, perhaps overzealously, say he had rescued the Castries Central prime boss from the political dump.
It should also be noted that among Pierre’s acquired attributes is his sense of political timing, especially when it came to casting bread upon the waters, “the rivers of Babylon,” included. If for most of his first term his government had attracted citizen complaints about the egregious condition of the nation’s roads, if hardly a day dawned when the airwaves were not inundated with grim stories of consequent vehicular accidents and about the ever-escalating cost of food and other consumer items; if the nightmarish tales about unreliable healthcare seemed without end, by Polling Day the mood had abruptly changed. So much for the anesthetizing effect of Christmastime pay increases, government contracts for the asking, backpay for public servants, a minimum wage and the completion at long last of St. Jude Hospital. Abruptly the mood had changed from depression to exuberance, however irrational.
Few could possibly have been surprised by the outcome of the 2025 elections: 16-1—all credit to “Mr. Pierre,” who had taken Richard Frederick and Stephenson King by their hardly virgin hands at several rallies and pleaded with his programed apostles to “please do me a special favor and vote for them!”
One is tempted to speculate about Pierre’s familiarity with Quintus Cicero, author of Little Handbook on Electioneering, to help his brother Marcus win a consulship. In it, Quintus urges Marcus to keep in mind: Elections are not won on merit alone. Voters judge appearances, favors and familiarity. Reputation matters more than abstract integrity. You must seem generous, loyal and powerful, even if reality is messier. Flatter shamelessly. Remember names. Praise people’s importance. Withholding flattery is more dangerous than overusing it. Make promises you may not keep. Be non-specific about how and when. Breaking a promise later angers fewer people than refusing one now. Court everyone: elites, businessmen, guilds, popular leaders. Let different groups believe you are their man. Call in favors. Remind people what you’ve done for them. Attend social events constantly; visibility is power. Be seen everywhere. Virtue is useless if not advertised. Politics is theater and the candidate must always be on stage. Forget everything you once considered honorable.
Shortly before the Saint Lucia’s most recent election, no less a personage than Senator Allison Jean, grieving mother of Botham Jean, who was fatally shot by an off-duty Dallas police officer while eating his favorite ice cream, whose 2019 murder trial made world headlines, showed not the smallest hint of unease during a Senate sitting when, as if by deific command, she renamed Pierre, “Moses of the East.”
Far less prominent citizens: street vendors, contributors to the daily live-radio programs, fishermen and small contractors, also spoke of Pierre in reverential tones. It’s as if they secretly believed their political leader not only capable of feeding the nation’s hungry with just five dollars and two fishes, but also of turning the Compton dam water into the finest wine. Old crows, permanent residents of William Peter Boulevard, as well as career civil servants, taxi drivers and ever accessible Constitution Park pundits, at the smallest provocation declared their limitless “love for Mr. Pierre,” comparable only with their love for God. It remains to be seen whether theirs is the caliber of love that can move mountains. Meanwhile, who better to name STAR Person of the Year 2025?
