In 1975, Premier Robert L. Bradshaw stood in Buckleys Estate Yard, in memory and reverence of the historic Buckleys Riot of 1935, and he acquired the sugar lands for the people of this country.
In 1982, Premier Dr. Kennedy A. Simmonds paid for those lands. One year later, he became our country’s first Prime Minister.
Then his successor Prime Minister, Dr. Denzil L. Douglas, declared that it was now his turn to distribute those lands.
And he set about his task of ‘distributing’ those lands his way.
The history of the vast majority of Kittitians is a history of landlessness. And you’d think that the steps taken by both Messrs. Bradshaw and Simmonds would’ve opened the floodgates for our people to be empowered through land ownership and related property rights.
This is what helped England explode into a giant economy in 1688: property ownership and property rights.
Yet today, some 37 years since Mr. Bradshaw acquired the lands and some 30 years since Dr. Simmonds paid for them, while many have received little house lots and some commercial lots, and despite the excellent Village Freehold Lands Act of 1997 which, logically and appropriately, vested lands in and around estate yards to long-standing occupants-worker families, and despite the numbers of house lots and houses distributed to our people, too many continue landless.
And it’s shaping up to get worse.
I know persons who have been on the waiting list for a piece of land for over 20 years. And still no land. Some have saved up over the years to build their own homes. But no land.
Indeed, I know Kittitians who, since applying for land here, have gone overseas to work in order to save and return home later on, and who have since been able to buy property overseas, while they still can’t get to own a piece of the land where their navel strings are buried.
Yet our Prime Minister has declared that it’s now his turn to distribute the lands.
Here’s how the bulk of the Government’s lands in St. Kitts have been ‘distributed’ over the last 17 years.
The Prime Minister set up the White Gate Corporation, vested 6,300 acres of land in it—that’s nearly 10 of our island’s 68 square miles.
Now nothing is wrong with that in and of itself. It’s still Government’s land, and included in the White Gate Development plan were areas for food production and nature trails, etc.. Great.
But what Dr. Douglas wanted was to take this land from the central operations of the Government and set it up as part of his own fiefdom, with a Board of Directors to do his bidding, and so on.
And that’s essentially how it evolved.
For example, one developer was granted a lease with an option to buy a big piece of land. In the case of a sale, the price was to be US80 cents per square foot, and all rents paid up would constitute part of the purchase price.
This left the renter in a strong position, with the need for little cash outlay upfront with the ability to sell land and use its buyers’ cash to pay the Corporation, and with the prospect of massive profits.
And that’s what happened, with land sales being recorded as high as US$40 per square foot in 2011 (long after the White Gate Corporation should’ve been wound up and all those directors’ fees and other expenses saved), and its buyers being eligible to apply for passports under our Citizenship by Investment Program.
Wouldn’t a smart Corporation, and a Government looking out for its people, have gotten a better deal for the land?
It’s from lands in this area that the son of a billionaire African leader had promised to buy 5 acres for US$5 million and was in turn given a diplomatic passport. But after the French Police went after him, there was a scramble to recover the passport.
Is this the way our lands are to be distributed?
Then there is a chap to whom two pieces were allotted in exchange for election services. Then, without having paid a red cent on the land, he ‘sold’ a piece to another chap and collected $90,000.00. Then he fled the island. So the ‘buyer’ went to the Government for help, and reportedly got it. Did the Government get paid?
Is this how our lands are to be distributed?
Then there’s the other chap who was allotted 15 acres. He hasn’t paid a cent down, and now is awaiting a loan from the SIDF to develop the land.
No money out of his pocket.
His project has been included in the Citizenship by Investment Program, so he will have drawings of about 50 units, and will try to sell them for about US$400,000.00, or more, yielding at least US$20 million, with him looking to make a cool US$5 million, without him having risked one cent.
And one of the more curious aspects of this matter is that in the Cabinet Submission for this project there was absolutely no mention of his name.
Then some time ago, 400 acres of Government land were vested in the La Vallee Corporation, which, like White Gate, stands under his Ministry. And an agreement was made putting the management of the La Vallee Development in the hands of a company owned by friends of his.
And after constructing a three-quarters-of-a-mile-long fence costing $4 million, and doing some land work, and not selling even one square foot of land, La Vallee had run up a debt of over $200 million.
Meanwhile, the company holding the management contract owed a lot of debts, and its owners formed a new company to carry out the same work, without anyone as much as batting an eyelash. Today, creditors of the first company are still waiting for their money.
And with all of that waste, the La Valle Corporation still has a Board of Directors. I wonder if they still get paid.
Meanwhile they’re looking for a buyer. In fact, they’ve been looking for a buyer for the last five years.
Maybe the gentleman whom jetted in for three hours on Sunday will buy it, or instead, he might buy the lands in Sandy Point. But I hear that he likes Brimstone Hill too.
Then we had Potato Bay, where there was a great hurry to put in roads shortly before the 2004 elections so that house lots could be sold, and with the intention that a company owned by friends of Dr. Douglas would have control over the development, at no risk to itself.
How much debt has it run up? I don’t know. How much land has it sold? I think none. And here we are, eight years later.
Here again, another example of how Dr. Douglas has used his turn to distribute the people’s lands.
In the midst of all of this ‘comess’, the national debt was skyrocketing. And as early as 2002, the Government signed over 2,500 acres of land to the National Bank as collateral for its debt to the Bank.
By 2006 at least 1,142 additional acres were thrown in as collateral, and by 2007, it had climbed up to 4,700 acres. That’s nearly 8 square miles of the 68-square mile island of St. Kitts, nearly 8 square miles of the people’s land, hocked to the Bank to cover the Government’s debt to it.
And while the situation grew worse, as acre after acre, sometimes hundreds at a time, was hocked to the Bank, all we could hear from him was “national debt, me arse”, “Like it or lump it”, “so what”, and similarly asinine comments such as “we were land rich”.
He even borrowed $30 million from the Bank to pay double salaries in December, 2009, and I’m told, the Bank said “Okay, but let’s have some more land”.
So the true picture is yet to be seen by the people of this country. We do not know exactly how much of our land Dr. Douglas has hocked to the Bank.
In the end, the stuff had to hit the proverbial fan, so right after the 2010 elections, we saw, and felt, his battery of heavy taxes and charges, creditors of the Government were asked to take a ‘haircut’ (up to now we don’t know what ‘haircut’ the Social Security Board has taken), in came the IMF, millions of dollars paid to people to negotiate down a debt that should never have risen as high as it did (more wasted millions right there), and Dr. Douglas travels the world looking for people to buy off our land so that the National Bank can be paid the $1 billion that the Government owes it.
1,200 acres, or just under 2 square miles, for starters, and God knows how many more square miles of our land to follow.
He says it’s his turn now, and this is how he’s distributing the lands of the people of St. Kitts & Nevis.
It’s so disgraceful that even the hallowed soil of Buckleys Estate Yard is also up for sale.
And on top of that, a foreign-born seller of artifacts who holds a St. Kitts & Nevis diplomatic passport is setting himself up to ‘preserve’ and ‘conserve’ our agricultural and industrial artifacts.
This is symbolic of the desecration of Kittitians and Nevisians, and their land and their heritage, which will underscore the legacy of Denzil Douglas and those who stand, and fall, with him.
