How comforting it must be for the Chief Minister to be able to bury his head in the sand and pretend that he has not mismanaged Anguilla’s finances on an industrial scale. In seeking to conceal the extent of his incompetence and – I am sorry to conclude – deliberate failures of good governance, I hope and trust he is fighting a losing battle, because Anguilla and Anguillians can no longer afford the economic destruction he has inflicted, and continues to inflict, on our beloved country.
And how comforting it must be for Lord Ahmad, the British Minister for the Overseas Territories, to say to the Chief Minister, as he did in his letter of 13th March 2018: “I also hope that you recognise the seriousness of Anguilla’s financial position.”, thereby attempting to suggest that the fault lies entirely with Anguilla.
“A plague on both their houses”, the hypocrites. They are both (and for Lord Ahmad read “the British Government”) as guilty as each other, as I shall outline below. Yes, on behalf of all the good people of Anguilla:
“A plague o’ both your houses! Zounds, a dog, a rat, a mouse, a cat to scratch a man to death! A braggart, a rogue, a villain that fights by the book of arithmetic!”
Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet.
So what are my charges towards the Chief Minister in this unholy mess? Leaving aside the fact that he and his colleagues have, for the last quarter century, been the sole architects of Anguilla’s decline, I shall not mention all the detail; to do so I would occupy an entire edition of the Anguillian leaving no room for anything else. I will just say very briefly that, since taking office in 2015, he has surreptitiously manipulated the banking crisis and other financial challenges, without coming clean with the Anguillian people as to what he was doing, in a manner that has not only destroyed Anguilla’s credibility for all but the boldest and most savvy investors, but which has extended Anguilla’s finances to the point that all but the very wealthiest and most corruptly favoured in Anguilla are already suffering hideously. Most will continue to suffer hideously for a long time to come, and I fear our youth will have no incentive to stay to build the country’s future unless we start to get it right very soon indeed.
As for Lord Ahmad, Anguilla has had constitutional obligations to govern itself properly, with oversight from Britain. But what has Britain (and by extension the Foreign and Commonwealth Office) done to uphold the Constitution? Sweet nothing. And that is disgraceful. At the very least Britain was better resourced to look after us than the Government of Anguilla – but nix, zero, no adequate supervision for not just months but YEARS, with all that time Anguilla failing to produce compliant accounting. What in heaven’s name did Britain think its duty entailed in its oversight of Anguilla’s good governance? Nothing apparently. How do they think they are justified in penalising us now, in our hour of greatest need?
We have just witnessed in the Commonwealth Games, in which our young boxers fought on a world stage, that when both boxers in the ring are on the floor, the fight is called off. The contestants live to fight another day. This is such an occasion. Both players, Anguilla and Britain, in our current reality, have screwed up big time. Let the truce begin and let the stronger – Britain – come to the table and not only show some compassion on the grounds of its past comptemptible failures, but let it use the opportunity to start monitoring its Overseas Territory responsibly and to the benefit of all concerned, including Britain itself. The silver lining in this cloud is that we currently have a Governor of integrity and capability. At his swearing in he said: “I will be driven by a desire to do the right thing, not just the expedient”. Instead of tying his hands with the traditional restrictions on his mandate, that artificially limit his capacity to influence the decisions of government in Anguilla, Britain should loosen that shackle and empower him to “do the right thing”, even when that may be to withhold approval to proposals coming before Executive Council.
But let the failure, hitherto, of the British, not be a victory for the current Anguilla government. Successive Anguilla governments are equally, absolutely and totally responsible for their abysmal failures and deceptions, however energetically they may seek to shelter themselves from any responsibility. The AUF’s election mantra was: “It’s All About You”. What they meant was “It’s All About Those of You Whom We Can Manipulate to Make it All About Us”.
Make no mistake AUF, your time is past. And AUM: you have no greater claim on the levers of power. For fifty years you have talked incessantly without doing anything to assure progress. AUF and AUM: you are both bust.
We, the good people of Anguilla, are ready for real change and that means getting it “right”.
