- Here’s why Gonsalves’ ULP must be defeated
Today marks 812 days since the increasingly unpopular and autocratic government of Ralph Gonsalves unleashed its dreaded vaccine mandate on the people of SVG. Hundreds of workers in the private and public sectors lost their jobs. The suffering has been unbearable. As a result of the government’s actions, workers could not make ends meet. Many lost their minds as the mental health crisis brought on by the mandate took its toll.
Yesterday, the Eastern Caribbean Court of Appeal was due to hear the vaccine mandate case. Following the resounding legal thrashing Gonsalves suffered when Justice Esco Henry delivered her decision on March 13, 2023, Gonsalves said the judge was wrong in fact and law and vowed to appeal. He made this declaration without having digested the court ruling.
Justice Esco Henry is an erudite and courageous judge. The intellectual rigour that undergirds her decisions is difficult to break through. The government lawyers who will be paid hundreds of thousands of taxpayers’ money will have difficulty convincing the appeal panel that the decision should be overturned.
Fundamental to the government’s argument is that it should be allowed to do anything once it declares a medical emergency. State workers who refused to take the vaccine maintained that even in a medical emergency, their rights secured under the Constitution had meaning and should be enforced.
It should never have come to this. Even with low vaccination rates, SVG never really had a medical emergency. Countries with many more infections and deaths never resorted to Gonsalves’ draconian policies. Our government was the only country in the region that wilfully and heartlessly dismissed workers for refusing to go along with its dreaded policies.
What most Vincentians know now is what some of us knew and explained very early in the plandemic. By the time Gonsalves imposed his vaccine mandate, Antigua had dropped its policy. Reports from Israel and the UK indicated that the vaccines were neither safe nor effective. Even before the mandates were imposed here, Chief Medical Officer Dr Simone Keizer-Beache and the government knew that the vaccines did not protect against infection, hospitalisation or death. In her affidavit, she disclosed that persons who were vaccinated were being infected, and at least one vaccinated man had died from COVID-19.
By February 2022, eight government parliamentarians, all of whom Gonsalves claimed were vaccinated, tested positive for COVID. Yet the government insisted and persisted with its devilish policies. Gonsalves was the only leader in the world who claimed that he wanted to vaccinate 90% of the population. Today, Gonsalves SVG is the only country in the world that maintains a medical emergency.
The sad reality from this very sordid vaccine affair is many in which so-called progressives abandoned their responsibility and toady up to Gonsalves’s nonsense. Following the overwhelming legal victory of the workers in March of 2023, rather than demand that Gonsalves end his madness, they allied with him, claiming that “everyone expected an appeal”. The 13 other leaders across CARICOM never mistreated their citizens as Gonsalves did. Yet Gonsalves claimed that regional leaders encouraged him to appeal because they wanted to know how to act in an emergency. A court does not have to tell the government. Our constitutions instruct us how to act.
It was the refusal and failure of the government to act in keeping with the Constitution that Justice Henry ruled the government vaccine mandate “illegal, unconstitutional, ultra vires and tainted with procedurally improper”.
Gonsalves’ mistreatment of Vincentian workers offers a powerful reason why his government should be removed from power. Workers must mobilise and organise to ensure that the defeat is massive. Those younger parliamentarians who sat idly while Gonsalves’ vile, vindictive, selfish and mean-spirited policies wreaked havoc must be punished electorally.
But there are many more reasons why this government must go. Day by day, it demonstrates that it has outlived its usefulness. Nothing it does now points to a sustainable plan for the country’s development. All plans represent its attempt to hoodwink the population to retain its domination over our country.
After 23 years in government, Gonsalves and his clansmen are primarily committed to feathering their own nest at the expense of citizens. As they get fatter and more decadent, they become increasingly alienated from the people. They cannot point to one sustainable project that will place St Vincent and the Grenadines in a better place economically or socially.
Four out of every 10 Vincentians live in poverty. Another two or three out of 10 live just above the poverty level. Unemployment is over 40%. Underemployment is a growing problem as young people leave school and are forced to take jobs that pay a few hundred dollars monthly. Social prostitution is on the rise. The exploitation and sexploitation of workers, especially women, are on the increase. Crime, with 52 murders recorded in 2023, its most glaring indicator, points to the government’s failure. Fear stalks the land. Hopelessness and helplessness are detected on many faces.
They claim that tourism drives our development, yet the sites that should attract tourists are poorly maintained. The roads to Dark View Falls, Fort Charlotte, Montreal Gardens, and Richmond are a disaster; the toilet facility at our volcano is a non-functional mess. The only thing that works is the government giveaway of our national treasures to foreign business enterprises. Rayneau gets 59 acres of our lands at Richmond for a measly EC$1,200 a year. It despoils the landscape, anticipating multiple orgasms only to have its joy interrupted by plenty of soil and few stones.
Justifying the giveaway and environmental degradation, our PM cluelessly likened SVG to “a big stone heap with good soil”. As if that was not bad enough, he embarked on a useless, expensive, unsustainable EC$600 million port project. The contractors budgeted to spend tens of millions of dollars to import sand to fill in the Kingstown harbour. Gonsalves initially said he would collect $1, then $2, then $4.5 million for 1.17 million cubic meters of sand. Only after stout advocacy and opposition to the fire sale of our country’s resources, Gonsalves, the cunumunu, claims he demanded EC$20 million for the sand. Meanwhile, the profit the contractors make from dredging the sand rather than importing it remains a “company secret”. Unknown is the environmental consequence of disturbing the sea bed off Argyle.
No thinking person who loves SVG can be impressed with such a dismal report card. Failure is written all over this administration. Gonsalves’ hold on our country must be broken.
