“Work hard in silence. Let your success be the noise”: Frank Ocean – American singer, songwriter, rapper, producer and photographer – born 1987
The first three and a half pages of the Honourable Chief Minister’s 2018 Budget Address contain commendable aspirations for Anguilla – aspirations many of which should have been implemented, or at the very least embarked upon, during the first three years of this current AUF government’s term.
The Chief Minister trumpeted in his Budget Address, as aspirations, many aspects of environmental and sociological enlightenment, such as control over the use of plastics, the use of renewable energy, building for resilience, criminal justice reform, Cannabis legislation, fisheries development, health service reform. But Frank Ocean had it right when he said “Work hard in silence. Let your success be the noise.” Where is the hard work in relation to these aspirations? Still more, where is the success? Three years in office and these aspirations are apparently only a glint in the government’s eye, rather than being, as they should have been if the government had not been spending so much time making a hash of dealing with the banking crisis, well advanced in the planning or even the implementation phases. Like so many of the promises made by the AUF in their election campaign, on the pretext that it was “ALL ABOUT YOU”, we would be unwise to hold our breath while waiting for this government to deliver.
Worse than that too, unfortunately, is the fact that notwithstanding the commendable and sterling efforts of volunteers, Anguilla had undoubtedly become a messier, dirtier and less attractive environment even before Hurricane Irma. And, while the cleanup has been vigorously pursued by many, the volunteers were starting from a lower base than they should have been.
It will be interesting to see what the wider verdict will be on the Budget Address. It leaves so many questions unanswered that should have been answered long since. If the government party hadn’t made promises it stood no chance of keeping, and had been one that worked for the benefit of Anguilla with the people, instead of in a gilded (or not so gilded) tower, keeping the people other than its cronies at arm’s length, we would be in a far far better place now, even after the hurricane. It scarcely seems possible that a government with such elevated aspirations, but so little governmental success to show for it, can pretend to be on top of its game and entitled to complain about Britain’s concern to protect it from itself; but that is the situation in which we apparently find ourselves.
The Chief Minister said this about the British concern to protect the Anguillian people from mismanagement of Anguilla government resources. And we would do well to remember that much of the funding required can only come from the Anguillian people, who can ill afford it. He said: “What I speak of now, Mr Speaker, is humanitarian aid, how it is given and how it is received, Mr Speaker, Anguilla is a proud nation; it will always have its pride, its limits in what it can allow or visit on its people, its intimate knowledge of its populace, what is going through and what it can bear. It is therefore untenable in the pursuit or the acceptance of humanitarian aid that it be bound by constraints, tied by conditionalities, not related to correction of any purported human rights abuses, but as a bargaining tool to bring one into line with the agenda of the administering power. The stick and carrot approach is indefensible, where the real casualty of failure to acquiesce is the welfare of children, the sick, an entire country’s rehabilitation following the devastation of a natural disaster.”
No one is more eager than I am to see the welfare of children and the sick looked after, and the country’s rehabilitation expedited. But the Chief Minister’s appeal to national pride is perverse and counter-productive, popular though it may be with his followers. It cannot surely be reasonable to expect the mother country to hand over a sack of gold and to look the other way. To do so in the knowledge that on past experience, and based on a record of extremely weak financial controls, as I am rapidly learning from my experience leading the first Public Accounts Committee that has ever been convened in Anguilla, would be to tarnish Anguilla’s future prospects of support irreparably. To argue otherwise does a grave disservice to prospects for financial support for Anguilla’s upcoming and future generations. The Honourable Chief Minister should swallow his pride; his refusal to do so is causing hardship and deprivation every day that his obstinacy continues.
