Editors note: For clarity of purpose and brevity, this letter is published in a two-part series. It contains five points of reference, a summary, a plea to young people and irrefutable scientific facts.
Dear Sir
Prime minister Allen Chastanet who called a young person like myself, and other Saint Lucian’s mendicants and jackasses are now revisited by the eponymy of the words, palpably surrounded by COVID-19 pandemic. Equally faced, are malicious happens that the United Workers Party (UWP) and their surrogates are thus unable to understand why and how the Saint Lucia Labour Party (SLP) led by Philip J Pierre is playing his cards beautifully.
First
The government was ill-prepared to understand COVID-19 and at the onset, the prime minister went on vacation when he should have been pre-occupied planning and leading. But hysterically the ‘Poodle’ responded that Cabinet is capable. In reality, that capability, to reference a sitting Cabinet minister, “it’s a mess.”
Second
The panic lockdown was the decision of an emperor without clothes unable to understand medical data and the implications to the social and economic fabric of the people and country. Then there is the chief medical office (CMO) and Cabinet ministers caught acting sheepishly and terrified to be on the bread line, instead of upholding the honor of their oath of office.
This reminds me, as a young person unable to identify with the modus operandi: What good is it to spend five years at medical school or four years at law school, to be ruled by a prime minister of much lesser attributes and who openly disrespects Saint Lucians (of which he is not a typical Lucian) as mendicants and jackasses. Yet says we’re ALL-IN.
The panic curfew and closure of the island could have been managed in a phase approached if data, testing and The National Emergency Management Organisation (NEMO) were up to the task. This is more evident when it was widely known that COVID-19 early cases were from Marisile, Carellie, Gros Islet, Vieux Fort and Dennery. At this point, you can discount the prime minister, his Cabal Cabinet, and advisors, whom I have to acknowledge are misfits and unworthy.
Third
The wild bluff of thinking along with the likes of the “The Art of the Deal” by Donald Trump – his equivalent in Saint Lucia to create a comic or grotesque effect – drop a tantrum of 35-60 percent wage cut on civil servants is one such case – expecting ‘mendicants and jackasses’ to surrender to their master, compromise, or be forced to comply.
My information is the prime minister and one other supports such recommendations. The others know, if this is upheld, they may very well be out of government, because the public servants can change governments. History can repeat its self, thinking that public servants are grossly over-payed and unproductive and should be brought in line with starvation wages, aligned with the ‘mulatto bourgeoisie’ commercial sector.
Such thinking is groundless when taken into consideration that a bus driver is the minister of teeth, steel and concrete, economic development and everything in-between. It is also impractical even by the best of consultants advising the government of Saint Lucia that someone can accept a 35-60 percent wage cut and continue to function.
If so, show me one model – I would like to live there.
To be continued … Part 2
Monica Fevrier
