Overheard some weeks ago after the meeting of ex-patriates at Chrishi Beach:
First White Woman ‘We must all contribute money to Brantley’s campaign’
Second White Woman ‘You must be joking’.
This is where credibility comes in.
Brantley says on his ‘On the Mark’, ‘It is important that when we come to the Public we come with good information with solid information, … information which is untainted by bias. This programme sets high standards of decency. It raises the level of debate’. We need to examine how far these fine words have been matched by results. Brantley is an Opposition spokesman. We would want him to oppose Government policy where his conscience tells him he should, but he is no good to us in that capacity if he does not speak the truth. Now that an election is upon us he is telling us that we should get back on track with his party, the CCM and return decency and good governance to Nevis. This is an invitation to examine the record of CCM in Government, and their performance in Opposition.
In November 2006 Brantley, on the air, said: ‘I am aware that what I call the pillage and plunder of the Treasury continues. I have described some of the hangers on as pigs to the trough, and there is a tremendous amount of eating going on. Snouts are in the trough. I am asking one of our top calypsonians to do a song for me and it’s going to be ‘The snouts are in the trough’. That sounds like a good campaign kind of jingle’. Surely, if you have evidence of this you inform the police. This should have warned us of the vague allegations of corruption that would follow.
I was aware when I started writing in the Press about ten years ago that I would have critics, but I did not expect the level of untruth, deceit, distortion, vilification and efforts to demean me personally that would ensue. I have referred several times to the fact that Brantley, then employed as a legal consultant to the CCM Government, advised that Nevis Geothermal be given away to St. Kitts. We do not know what then Premier Amory thought of this advice. Did he say, ‘Silly boy! We are not paying you for that!’ Or did he congratulate Brantley upon his wise advice. Someone should ask him. But it can’t be that which has put me in the Brantley firing line. I cannot explain it. Here are some of things he has said, a vendetta like campaign, you might think.
‘There are people here who write in the Press every week and in one case I know, I think there is a gentleman who writes in the Press all the time, who probably owns nearly a thousand acres of land in Nevis, certainly I know he owns several hundred and I have not heard that he has spent a dime trying to develop any aspect of that land…’ This is aimed at me, it cannot be anyone else. Why would he say it? He knows it to be untrue. He, himself, lives on the Montpelier Estate, developed at considerable expense by me. Nearly 1000 acres, no, more like 250.
A caller to ‘On the Mark’ asks how old I am. Brantley replies ‘At least 90, Methusalah’. On a later programme he describes me as being over 80. I can’t think what my age has to do with the issues of the day, but for the record I admit to being 70 when these exchanges took place.
He begins an article he entitles ‘King James’ which is about me, with the words ‘There is a certain wealthy landowner of unknown origin who has been appointed chief spokesman of the NRP’. I am not for hire. The thrust of his writing is to try to portray me as a reactionary from another world interested only in ‘keeping the natives down by depriving them of education’. The reverse is the case, and many may also know of my campaign to improve school meals, which is all a part of bettering people through education. In connection with that campaign, Brantley comments: ‘I am surprised to hear that he is interested in school meals. He has been observed loitering at the Ivor Walters School. Based on where he lives he would have passed that school, every day for the last 50 years. He never stopped once to offer anything to that school’. Truth is that the road from Montpelier allowing one to travel past the I.W. School on the way to Charlestown has been open just five years. ‘Loitering’ with its connotations of the criminal offence ‘loitering with intent’ has to refer to my occasional visits to give the I.W. kitchen fruit and vegetables from my garden. He continues, ‘Now in the late winter of his years he has finally found charity in his hitherto uncharitable heart’. How does he know? A defamatory remark of a mean spirited man is it not?
Then there is his scheme to make people believe that there is something sinister and corrupt in the Consent Order whereby the Government pay me EC$237,000.00 for land acquired by the Government for road purposes. The NRP Government should never have settled the action he says, and in talking of the amount agreed, he says ‘We know what NRP does for its big supporters’. This is an unwarranted suggestion of corruption. Truth is, my legal action against the Government could not have been successfully defended. Minister Guishard had, in writing, in 1995 enquired if I would be willing to sell the land. I replied in the affirmative. It is impossible to maintain that land is yours or belongs to the Public if you have disclosed via an enquiry that you know it belongs to someone else. I intended to enforce my claim for compensation against the Government, however constituted, because I had decided that this was to be my contribution towards the School Meals Programme. All of this money is committed to the Charlestown Primary School Kitchen equipment. Could Mr. Brantley not find it in his heart to say ‘Well done!’? I heard that CCM plans to cut the school meals subsidy. I hope this is not true. It is essential that it be maintained.
Now here is a striking matter. In 2009 there were the following exchanges ‘On the Mark’.
‘Caller: …Gaskell and Alastair Yearwood, why don’t we put them on a small boat, put them outside the limits, and tell them not to come back to Nevis, and if they do come back they would be killed.
Brantley: No you can’t tell them that. No you can’t tell them that at all.
Caller: Okay.
Brantley: One thing. What you say about the Commission of Inquiry?’
This is an incredible exchange. The unbalanced one puts up his suggestion, to which the experienced lawyer and host of a programme claiming to be all about decency and doing the right thing does not tell the caller that he is suggesting the most serious of crimes and that he is not welcome ever again on the programme, but appears only to be concerned with the straw poll he is conducting about the COI.
Lately ‘On the Mark’ has been airing that preposterous clip from a speech by Guishard before an earlier election in which he declares that people must not vote for NRP for ‘We cannot afford Yearwood and Gaskell. They must not run this country, and it would happen. They will sit in council over you. They would be the ones who would determine what happens to you…’
Do I need to say that I have spoken to Mr. Parry about four times in the last five years – about school meals. At the same time as this nonsense is pushed out, Brantley is claiming that Mr. Parry is the puppet of Prime Minister Douglas, and inventing a meeting between them which never could have taken place.
Some of the criticisms he makes of the NRP may well be valid for all I know. However knowing that so much that he has said about me is invention, I cannot trust what he says about anything else. If I cannot trust him in Opposition, I could trust him even less in Government.
We require many qualities in those who govern, competence, intelligence, imagination, fair dealing and industry. None of these means a thing without trust.
As we hope to find leaders in whom we may repose trust, so those leaders must trust the Courts to administer Justice impartially. The whole of Nevis owes Justice Albert Redhead an apology for the intemperate and unwarranted suggestion made on a CCM platform by their candidate Scarborough that the Judge might have been involved in corruption. CCM’s lawyers were on that platform and later when the Judge made a statement in Court on the matter they were there also. To borrow a Brantley phrase , ‘they sat mute as if they were but potted plants’. Justice Redhead is our Judge, a guest in our Island, here to perform a vital public service. The CCM has attempted to take from him that which he has earned through his life of service, his honour. They keep telling us that they are the party of decency and that they believe in doing the right thing. A small start would be to make a proper apology and remove Scarborough from their list of candidates.
To return to the theme, and as the second White Woman understood, and the first did not, CREDIBILITY MATTERS.
