By Dwyer Astaphan
I dedicate today’s article to the memory of Mrs. Ann Liburd, a great soldier for God, for social and political justice, for Labour and for women, who passed away last week, and I extend my deepest condolences to her family.
Last week’s so-called ‘March For Democracy’ was interesting.
One of the pretexts of the march was to push the case for fingerprinting to the people of this country as a prerequisite to them being allowed to vote in an election. The placards said so.
I say “pretext” because the main reason for the march was really to try to get people on the road behind Lindsey Grant in the hope that his thus far lacklustre leadership of PAM might get a desperately-needed boost.
That’s why you saw some of the old PAM fogies out there last Thursday, on the road with ordinary folks who you would not ordinarily see them mingling with.
Remember, I told you last week that US citizens (or Britons, Germans, the French, the Swiss, Swedes, Russians or Canadians) would never tolerate their Government trying to impose fingerprinting in an election on them?
Yet, here in St. Kitts & Nevis, two US citizens, namely Lindsey Grant and Shawn Richards, along with some other persons, are trying to push it down your throats.
They want Labour out, just like Labour was put out in Antigua, and PNP in Jamaica, and they see fingerprinting as a tool to get that job done.
The problem with PAM’s strategy is that it violates the rights, the dignity, the decency, the intelligence and the sensibilities of the people of this country.
But what does Grant care about that? He wants power and he is willing to do anything to get it.
Who matter to him are the ‘haves’ (the well-off) and the ‘hurry-come-ups’ (that’s a Jamaican term).
Do you know the ‘hurry-come-ups?’
They are people who have made it out of poverty and who try their contemptuous best to distance themselves from their past, as they latch on to the ‘haves’ like spineless happy-puppies.
They are the ones who are climbing the ladder and who can’t wait to kick it down from under them once they think they have ‘arrived’.
Hey, I’m all for people trying to lift themselves out of economic and social disadvantage. But I’m against people forgetting their past and showing contempt and disrespect to the poor.
And though the ‘hurry-come-ups’ feel that they have indeed ‘arrived’, the ‘haves’ always treat them with disdain and scorn, though not as blatantly as they do the poor.
But the ‘hurry-come-ups’ are often too glad to see that, and they often, unthinkingly, embarrass themselves and their roots just to prove that they have ‘arrived’.
Look here. Grant, Richards, Blanchette, Warner, Hamilton and the others know that you are extremely protective of your own privacy that you don’t even like to have your pictures taken in public.
Especially in this day and age when people take your picture and, next thing, you know, you are on the internet doing all kinds of things or having all kinds of things being done to you.
They also know that you don’t like to answer phone calls from undisclosed numbers.
You all are funny when it comes to your privacy. And nobody can blame you, or penalize you, for that.
But they don’t respect you. And that is why they’re telling you that if you want to exercise what’s already your constitutional right to vote, you will now have to give them (and God knows whoever else) your fingerprint!
And if you do give them your fingerprint, suppose a president or a prime minister of a big and strong country demands the voter fingerprint database, what can our prime minister say?
If he says no, St. Kitts & Nevis could be threatened, blacklisted and destabilized. And if he says yes, he will have betrayed his own people. Bad news, any way you look at it.
Why would Grant want you to be put in such a situation?
And if you refuse to be fingerprinted, if you refuse to become a slave under the New World Order, then even better for PAM, because it means that you won’t vote.
So, armed with their scheme of trickery, and receiving a lot of free beer, water and dollars, PAM held public rallies for nearly three weeks straight, with live music costing thousands of dollars a night (I’m happy for the musicians and DJ’s), in order to rouse up PAM supporters from every nook and cranny in the island.
And with all of that, they still couldn’t muster even 1,000 people in his march.
Mission NOT accomplished!
Yet, by some false logic, with their 700-man march last Thursday, PAM and their foolish media friend want us to believe that PAM now have a favourable national consensus on the issue of fingerprinting.
700 people cannot speak in this matter for the entire population of some 35,000 in St. Kitts. What about the other 34,300 of us? And what about the people of Nevis? Don’t they have a say too?
Election regulations cannot and must not suppress people’s desire and their right to vote, but rather they must encourage and support the fair and decent exercise of that right.
We do not need fingerprinting in order to have a fair election in this country. And demanding people’s fingerprints in order to allow them to vote is not only wrong, it is also dangerous.
PAM imposed the present system in 1984 without consulting the people of this country. And they have refused to participate in the consultation which has been under way for well over a year now.
Rather, they wish to march, against themselves really, given the fact that it is their system which has been used for the past six elections.
Their way, or no way! That certainly is not the way democracy works.
Yet, what do we see on some of the placards? “March For Democracy”.
Has PAM ever operated along democratic lines?
In 1983-4 when they passed all of these electoral laws in a haste, and got over 4,000 new names added to the voters’ list in less than two months, did my friend Jackie Cramer(who is now Israel’s honorary consul to St. Kitts & Nevis) march for democracy?
During the PAM years in office when all TV channels would close down for Kennedy Simmonds to make his speeches on ZIZ, did Lindsey Grant and his family march for democracy?
When the two books written by Anguillians, depicting the events of the 10th of June, 1967, were banned by the PAM Government, did Michael Morton (now Turkey’s honorary consul to St. Kitts & Nevis) and half of the top staff of TDC and the Bottling Company march for democracy?
When the nation heard the improper conversations between a Minister and a Magistrate/Registrar, did ‘Doggie’ of the Democrat march for democracy?
When 45 bags of cocaine were found by Scotland Yard detectives at a certain Cayon home in 1994, and no member of that home’s family spent even a minute in police custody(triggering a prison riot), when a former Minister went on the local media and described one of his sons as a nice, Sunday-school boy, and when he was asked to stand down from his Ministry, but in the same breath was appointed as an adviser to the same Ministry, how come none of last week’s Frigate Bay, Mattingly and Bird Rock marchers did not march for democracy?
Why didn’t any of them see the need to march for democracy when Simmonds retained his ambassador despite the reports from the FBI, DEA and other agencies to the effect that the ambassador was the biggest money launderer in the Caribbean for the Cali Cocaine Cartel of Colombia?
It seems that they only now have an appetite to march for democracy.
And suppose TDC’s leaders had engaged in such a march against a PAM Government. What would have happened?
TDC has about 700 employees and 2,200 shareholders, a lot of whom are Labour supporters.
The involvement of so many top TDC officials in the march will have sent an unmistakable signal to its employees, shareholders and customers, and to the general public that TDC is now under the influence of politics; drunk with politics, as it were.
Only in a true democracy could a company do something like that, and not pay a dear price.
Now while TDC is marching for democracy its leaders might want to check to see if there are persons who do little or nothing for the Company, but who nevertheless pull down thousands of dollars monthly, plus free car, gas, maintenance, insurance, office, secretaries, etc. And if they find themselves giving anyone a free ride like that, they should serve democracy and bring an end to it.
They might want to advise their workers, their shareholders and their customers as to why their internal auditor is allowed to spend so much time away from his work while he receives his handsome salary and package.
If they really want to march for democracy, they would make sure that sinecure is not provided for PAM trumps in the form of jobs at the higher levels of the TDC Group, and turn it into a truly equal opportunity Group.
They would also put an end to a situation in which a PAM candidate (who does not even work at TDC) can send people whom he has just registered up to the Bottling Company or elsewhere in the TDC network with a promise of a job and of all of the good things they would get if PAM was elected, and a lecture from a manager as to how to get other people to register to vote for PAM.
And likewise for the bosses at the Brewery whose beer PAM was selling on Bank Street last week Thursday after the march at $1 a bottle, while the Brewery keeps bawling and telling its workers that things are tight and it cannot give them a good pay increase.
I wonder how many times the prized Brewery son-in-law has marched for democracy in his native land, Jamaica. Shouldn’t he have marched for democracy right here in St. Kitts, outside the Brewery Gate, when Selwyn Bart was so unceremoniously kicked out and made redundant?
I wonder why my friend, Derek, didn’t march for One Man, One Vote back in the days, not that long ago, when the same Michael Morton was registered to vote in two Constituencies at the same time.
Yes, last Thursday’s march was a simple case of PAM marching against itself. PAM introduced a system in 1984, and they are now protesting against the same system which they claim does not provide for Free and Fair Elections, or for One Man, One Vote.
So they want to fix it all by making sure that they have your fingerprint.
To the people who were fooled last Thursday, don’t allow it to happen again. You know the old saying: Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
Until Next Time,
Plenty Peace.
