By Joel Liburd

Stiff-necked fools, you think you are cool

To deny me for simplicity.

Yes, you have gone for so long

With your love for vanity now.

Yes, you have got the wrong interpretation

Mixed up with vain imagination.

–          Bob Marley, Stiff Necked Fools (1983)

The concept of the fool has been explored in art, music, theatre and politics in all its various forms; the love-struck fool, the bumbling fool, the professional fool… you name it. However, the fool has always been a rather loveable character that brings balance to the seriousness of the play on stage.

But real-life experiences are not far behind. For example, after experiencing a global pandemic – and with another threat on the horizon – behaving any other way than dead-serious is now popularly frowned upon. St. Kitts & Nevis Prime Minister, Timothy Harris, apparently missed that memo as he continues to impose his heavy political and crime-infested body weight on the tiny Federation, ripping apart and dragging it down with every convoluted turn of his twisted mouth.

Harris is adept at escaping fact-checking; even his reasons for the 2013 bust-up with his mentor, father-figure and financier, Dr Denzil Douglas, have already crumbled to reveal that it was greed and not gallantry that prompted his unholy crusade for the seat of power. The venerable Sam Condor – a man of unquestionable moral and spiritual values – unwittingly carried him past the finish line in 2015… only to walk away from him in 2020, publicly rueing probably the only mistake he (Condor) has made in a very distinguished professional life.

Harris fooled his financiers too, in 2020. Anthony Da Silva, the Barbadian contractor, pumped hundreds of thousands into the PLP campaign chest as furiously as though he were getting a drink from Queenie’s Well. Harris guaranteed The Man from BIM the lucrative Basseterre High School contract. But it was a determined Douglas, summoning a lifetime of political might, who managed to shine the spotlight on the brazenly corrupt deal, and send the Bajan slinking back into the shadows. 

That occurrence served to perk up the ears of his coalition partners. Nevis Premier Mark Brantley, Leader of the Concerned Citizens’ Movement (CCM) and the hapless Shawn Richards, who, since being handed the leadership of the great Kennedy Simmons’ People’s Action Movement party in 2012, has won the most seats in the Federal elections twice, but has been Prime Minister exactly zero times. Harris played him like a fool. And twice Harris ended up being the prime minister. Thus began Harris’ long seven-year journey of mayhem and wanton destruction of the democratic fiscal foundations of The Federation.   

But half-way into the second term, both Brantley and Shawn managed to extricate themselves from their stupor and started reading the fine print of their political pact. Yes, they knew that they allowed Harris to strut around with impunity, to place his family and friends in key positions in the public sector, including the judiciary and law enforcement. Despite their political experience, they knew and allowed the Terror of Tabernacle to assume the Prime Ministership after personally gaining only 5.43 percent of the national vote. 

Now that Brantley and Richards have sobered up, they realised that they’d been had. More than likely they probably have echoes of The Cardigans’ “Love Fool” reverberating in their minds, as they witnessed how Harris was raking in the big, legacy contracts and the CBI money, while throwing stale crumbs towards them as he keeps the key to the bakery in his pocket. That Harris was peculating from the public trough is not a contentious issue. Never in the history of the Federation has there been such massive destruction on all fronts. Timothy Harris is without doubt the Rajapaksa of the Eastern Caribbean. The scale of his mismanagement, nepotism and financial malfeasance is monumental and without equal for a small country. 

Meanwhile, Harris continued with his skulduggery. He made a fool of his Trinidadian advisor, Dr Sharon-Ann Gopaul-McNichol, a political failure who jumped political parties three times when she was unable to secure an executive post. Ironically, Gopaul-McNichol left the People’s National Movement party more than 15 years ago, blazing a public campaign that the party’s leadership, including current Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley, was involved in a paedophile ring, and possibly resulting in the untimely death of 11-year-old Akiel Chambers on May 24, 1998. 

But Psychologist Sharon met her match in Harris, and after she stoked the flame of controversy in proposing a third term for Harris, she was unceremoniously kicked to the curb and Harris put his brother Len, of the National Bank fame, to be his political man of business to clean up Sharon’s mess, and manage the campaign of his People’s Labour Party into a third election in seven years.

But the person who coined the saying “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me” obviously did not think that there would be an idiot who would try playing the same foolish game a third time. The Canadian singer Jewel tells us in “Foolish Games” that “I think I’ve mistaken you for somebody else…. somebody who gave a damn… these foolish games are tearing me apart… and your thoughtless words are breaking my heart…”

Harris doesn’t seem to mind what he breaks as he desperately throws his weighty self around in the Federation’s China shop. He has already imported voters wholesale from Haiti and the Dominican Republic; he has been given the specious advice – ostensibly from his brother Len – that grabbing Constituencies 1, 2 and 3 is simply “a numbers game”. So, he is back to paying for votes with taxpayers’ money. 

But more importantly, Harris knows that the back-to-back victories of his Team Unity coalition were built on a single foundation stone: that he was able to prevent the diaspora vote, also known as the “plane voter”. In that the St Kitts and Nevis Labour Party has some of its most ardent supporters and donors domiciled outside of the island, Harris, a child of the SKNLP,  knows the importance of getting those foreign fingers in the electoral ink. 

In 2015, on top of the fortuitous coincidence of flights being delayed out of the United States, he managed to stymie the arrivals at the Robert L. Bradshaw Airport in Basseterre with new forms, new protocols, and officers who seemed to be in a virtual work-to-rule mode. This resulted in passengers being officially landed just 15 minutes before the polls closed. They had no time to vote. Harris won.

In 2020, Harris dragged the election date past its expiration by months, fooling the courts with the loophole that his government was sworn in late, and so he was using his full five years to the day. That time lag managed to seep into the apex of a global pandemic. The Prime Minister must have interpreted it as a divine sign, when it was most likely the Lord’s way of reminding Harris of his final chance to repent, and stop making fools of the Kittitian electorate. Harris did not heed the warning, and gleefully closed the SKN borders faster than Granny Notha’s shop does on a Sunday night. No planes. No more votes for Douglas. Harris wins again.

His camp is feverishly trying to emulate that same scenario a third time for the upcoming  2022 election. The first step was to call the election on a Friday, so that working members of the diaspora are forced to rush in and out of SKN in a single day; that’s a tough choice in a post-pandemic world. If they have to come in a day or two earlier, they will have to take a leave of absence from their day jobs… something that their employers are bound to frown upon. 

The timing may not have the desired dramatic impact on turnout, so the question remains as to how to shut down the airport for a day. Not even a full day, but maybe just for a critical 12-hour window, even eight hours will do. There are still some unbelievable pandemic-related entry requirements and border controls in effect, and travellers, even citizens, have to be very cognizant and aware of all the procedures and protocols when they venture to enter the Federation now. 

In recent times, though, Harris has had his health mouthpiece, Minister Akilah Byron-Nesbitt speaking in a guarded, but alarmist manner, about the threat of monkeypox in SKN. Is she setting the stage for another border closure? Akilah, your slip might be showing.

And why have certain senior elements in both the police and fire services been scouting the RLB Airport? Why were all the staff evacuated from the terminal, just days before the election? How convenient for “someone” to “suddenly” find mould in this small, impeccably clean building. 

Are we going to hear of some other incident at the airport on election morning? Maybe a bushfire… service vehicle collision… or lifting of the runway asphalt… maybe even a hazardous chemical or sewer leak… or even a few firecrackers being fired off by the affable gentlemen of PEACE?

Something is brewing. Rest assured of that. In the same way a crack addict holds on to his pipe, so does the Prime Minister have his death-grip on power. His desperation has already clouded his political vision, and his manifestation of the seven deadly sins – pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth – seems to have stripped him of his humanity. Such a bold move, a distraction to close the airport, will no doubt attract the attention of the IATA and dozens of international security agencies, but Harris doesn’t care… once it gets him the win.

If Harris is foolhardy enough to create the conditions to prevent the diaspora from voting, he might just be able to get enough pieces in the game to negotiate another coalition. But at what cost? To have the third straight “most minority” government in a row? To have disappointment, frustration and dissent hanging over your administration like storm clouds over Mount Liamuiga? 

He will do whatever it takes – from manipulating cash and citizens alike – to score what could only be a Pyrrhic victory, if it happens. This time though, even if Harris thinks he will fool the population a third time, and the figures fall in his favour, it will never be counted as a win. No true leader counts himself as a winner when he has lost the support of the people. Voters should embrace British rockers, The Who, and show that they “won’t get fooled again”. 

Finally, it was Nelson Mandela who famously said, “Fools multiply when wise men [and women] are silent.” The people of The Federation are not fools and they would not be made fools by Timothy Harris on Election Day.

The time has come, even now, for the people of St. Kitts & Nevis to vote for a change in political leadership. Timothy Harris has singlehandedly ripped the country apart and left a trail of wanton destruction. The economy is in shambles, jobs have evaporated, poverty is on the rise, and the halcyon days of The Federation are a thing of the past. But there is a shining light at the end of this dark tunnel. It will be seen when the people rise up and dump Timothy Harris, burying him under the same pile of corrupt garbage that he created.

28^th July 2022

END

Joel B. Libur is a Communications Consultant, Basseterre/Quebec. The opinions expressed here are entirely his own and are not necessarily the opinions of the publisher or editor of iNews Cayman/ieyenews.com