MIA > Archive > Tim Hector
Fan the Flame, Outlet, 24 January 1997.
Online here https://web.archive.org/web/20120416011318/http://www.candw.ag/~jardinea/fanflame.htm.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
PM Lester Bird seems to have been stung by a Fan the Flame, headlined The Man in Perspective, so he got one of his sycophants to reply by lauding him to the skies. Apparently once you just touch the Man himself one of his sycophants suffers broken bones in the process.
Where in this world does an Ambassador get involved in the cut and thrust of internal politics? In any other country Dr. Patrick Lewis would be tendering his resignation for spewing forth his drivel and dribblings in defence of Lester Bird. However, in Antigua and Barbuda today, anything goes. All standards are trampled under foot and nothing is but what is not. So Ambassador Lewis can do what is patently wrong, dead wrong, and get away with it.
Dr. Patrick Lewis is obviously relying on my integrity not to reveal things he has told me about the Bird administration when he was aggrieved. But he obviously knows that not even on pain of death will I breach the confidence. Never. Not even if he were to provoke. It is a foundation, a corner stone of a code of conduct, at once personal and professional, never to reveal matters said to me in confidence. It applies to both distinguished ambassadors as to the unknown.
Dr. Lewis may also rest assured that whenever he comes up with a single idea, just one, then I will reply. Until then I leave him to wallow in his own shallow and callow praise of Lester Bird. He is yet to deal with my analysis of the man not as speculation, or psychological exploration, but as concrete, manifested reality.
I need only remind him of a few things. When Lester Bird returned to Antigua in 1969, Tim Hector as Editor of the Antigua Star named him as one of the People of the Year and wrote the piece on him even though we were on opposite sides. Again, when Independence came in 1981 it was the same Tim Hector who featured the same Lester Bird along with Paddy Winter, Mr. Universe, as one of the persons who had put Antigua in the international arena in sports. At that time Lester and I were daggers drawn. Nevertheless I could give him his due, as the record shows.
Dr. Lewis, may also have noted, that I have written appreciative pieces on the late Lionel Hurst and Denfield Hurst, the late Rowan Henry, the late Donald Sheppard, as too, on the late Ernest Williams as on the very fine E.H. Lake, to name a few. I did so while in opposition. And members of the families of all the persons, commended the fairness with which I wrote. No member of the ALP can claim to have given such credit to their own and so unfailingly as I have done. The record speaks for itself. It is by the record I stand, and never on the ravings of those who will make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, in endless flattery.
One last thing in my little life, I have worked with several headmasters, as a teacher, for many years, beginning with Mr. J. Foote, Rev. Ralph Brown, Rev. Hatch-Syrett, Mr. Leonard Shorey, all at the AGS; then Mr. Norman Southwell at All Saints School, Mr. Clarence Edwards at All Saints, Ms Ilma James at the Antigua Girls High School, Mr. Whitfield Harris at the Princess Margaret School, Mr. A.T. Lee at the Teachers Training College, and in the Ministry of Education with Mr. E.T. Henry as Permanent Secretary. There is not one of them, I am sure, who will not tell anyone that I gave anything but maximum support to their leadership. And while we may have had differences over this or that, not one who will say that they had any conflict with me or that I sought any. I am pretty proud of the fact that I am a good follower.
It is part of my own belief system that one learns to lead by first learning to follow. Logically then, none that I have followed in matters great or small, can say, or have said, that I have ever given less than my full support. And that, without flattery as a means of ingratiating myself with those entrusted with leadership. Nor have I envied a single person, a single thing, be they sportsman, or statesman, plutocrat or pauper.
Long ago, my grandmother assured and re-assured me, that we come into this world with nothing and we go out with nothing. A man truly owns only what he knows, she insisted. She did not claim that these were original ideas. I subsequently added to her maxims and said, that whatever any single person knows, however significant, can fit on a pin-head in relation to the whole body of universal knowledge. That induces both humility and confidence. I live everyday with that in mind.
I also live by, as a matter of life and death, the notion that it is the ordinary working people, in their own self-activity, who will transform this whole world, cruelly divided into Haves and Have Nots, Dominant and Dominated, into a truly human society, without classes, without sexism, without racism, and shorn of greed and corruption. It may not occur in my lifetime. The ideal is not attained, Hegel argued, with the speed of a shot from a pistol. But, in the pursuit of those ends, one can be, and will be defeated, from time to time. One must, as Hegel again demonstrated, go through “the patient labour of the negative’. But, one must return to the fray, like Chaplin’s tramp, with optimism undying. And, hopefully, undiminished.
I hasten to add in conclusion, I will not hold my breath a single second waiting for Dr. Lewis’ resignation. For such have no code of honour, however flimsy. They simply go along to get along. They even sing for their supper at the end of their speeches on radio, and no doubt, dance a jig for a bird fig, at the end of their paid advertisement of themselves, by themselves. Therefore, and in this context only, let the dead bury the dead. Or more aptly let the moribund rot in their own stink.
I return now to Lester’s making sense into nonsense, making a total bird mess of economics. Turning reality into fiction, with brazen ignorance. Said Lester, or rather, as someone said for Lester, who is himself a great ventriloquist, “On the economic front we have maintained growth in the economy ... we will finish the year with an average higher than most countries in the world, including developed ones.” Antigua is not only an economic giant, says Lester Bird, but it is doing better than most economic giants. Put simply, no part, not even an iota of truth is in that man. It is not that he is exaggerating. It is that he believes in lies. The bigger, the better.
First of all, let objective facts speak for themselves. “The dis-savings (losses) of public enterprises in Antigua and Barbuda”, wrote the IMF “average 4.7 percent of GDP up to 1995. With little capital revenue or expenditures the overall deficit was about 5 percent of GDP during the period and was financed primarily by an accumulation of external arrears.”
A more sorry economic performance one cannot imagine. With GDP standing at $412 million, public enterprises, under Lester Bird’s mismanagement lost over $20 million. And this loss was paid for, by failure to pay external debts, aggravating both the external debt crisis and the chronic losses of public enterprises under Lester Bird. Yet the man had the temerity to turn this sorry, miserable and dread economic record into a heaven of growth, far superior to developed countries. A sick dwarf was transformed into a giant by callous lies. Lester Bird cannot desist from such blatant and total misrepresentations of the truth.
Let us take another sector of the economy. The Antigua Public Utilities Authority which provides electricity, water and telephone services. Said the IMF economists “The APUA has had virtually no capital expenditure since 1990”. Despite Lester Bird being “Half-Way There” this dread situation has not changed. Continuing, the IMF economists told Lester Bird to his face and in print “The current account of APUA has been in deficit since the late 1980’s, when a desalination and power plant started to operate at a cost that was not covered by water and electricity tariffs. In addition the APUA’s technical and non technical losses have remained high – 20 percent of water and electricity production at the end of 1994 and 1995.” What a miserably bad record. 20 percent of water and electricity produced under the Lester Bird administration is lost, from the start! The mismanagement is gross. So gross that it provides grist for the mill for those who wish to prove that we in these underdeveloped countries cannot manage anything. And thus, all things have to be turned over to foreign private management.
In yet another sector of the economy, even Lester Bird’s Minister of Tourism could not take his base lies about the economy. In giving the record of tourism, Minister of Tourism Rodney Williams said that “Total stay-over arrivals in 1994 declined by 8 per cent compared to 1993. After Hurricane Luis when we lost the entire winter season, from October 1995 to April 1996, both years recorded a further decline” on the 1994 decline. Added to the Minister of Tourism’s admission of a steep decline in tourism under the Lester Bird administration the IMF economists also noted that “average daily expenditures by stay-over visitors declined during the period.” So both in number of stay-over tourists and in the expenditure of those tourists, tourism declined steadily under the Lester Bird administration. Yet Lester Bird was proclaiming and professing stupendous growth, outstripping even developed countries.
In yet another sector of the economy under Lester Bird there is the same sorry tale of woe, incompetence and lack of direction. Said the IMF economists “Direct foreign investment declined from US$30 million a year in 1990–93 to US$14 million (about 3 per cent of GDP) in 1994, 1995 probably because investors were uncertain about future policies – in particular in the tax area – following the March 1994 election.” The IMF economists continued “Commercial Banks contributed to the deficit in capital account in 1993–94 when they increased their foreign asset portfolio due to the slackening of demand for domestic product.”
So under Lester Bird foreign investment declined sharply by more than 50 per cent. The decline was directly due to Lester Bird’s baseless tax policies. That cannot be denied. On top of that domestic investment also declined sharply under Lester Bird, as the banks had money they could not lend for domestic investment. So the banks bought U.S. bonds to invest the monies they could not lend locally under Lester Bird. Lester Bird does not have a clue how to reverse this trend. And so under him it remains irreversible.
Lester Bird does not know and does not bother to learn. He spends all of his time in wildness and consorting with rascals. While keeping in cold storage one or two with Ph.Ds, whose longwinded drivel, have made the young believe that Ph.D stands for dung in the brain piled high and deep. This is not conjecture it is observable fact. So to understand why in the banking system assets grew less rapidly than its liabilities to the private sector in 1994–95, which as the IMF economists said was due in the main “to a stagnation in credit to the public sector,” Lester would be utterly in the dark.
So under Lester Bird we have stagnation of the private sector and stagnation of the public sector. It is was dread as that. Yet Lester called stagnation in the public and private sectors, unbelievable growth.
May we proceed with Lester Bird’s economic record, however painful it is to relate. For, the truth must be known . For only the truth of our condition will free us. That is why Lester Bird tells not just lies, but big lies, so that we will remain unfree, hemmed in by a web of lies, our potential tightly corked down and never actualised.
The IMF economists writing up a macro-economic profile of Antigua under Lester had to tell Lester Bird even more unpleasant truths. That under him, wrote the IMF economists, “The agricultural sector now accounts for only 3 per cent of GDP” and even though production in agriculture is directed at the local market with little or no export, the IMF economists were forced to note that “none of the main crops is sufficient to meet domestic demand”. Even more tellingly the IMF economists stated though agricultural performance was bad under V.C. Bird in that “it increased by an annual average of 3.4 per cent in 1990–93.” Under Lester Bird agricultural production “declined by 1 per cent in 1994” and that was even before Hurricanes Luis and Marilyn By the way a 1 per cent decline in agriculture translates into a reduction by a third of total agricultural production. This is not a sorry state of affairs. It is an emergency situation, which calls for emergency remedies. It is the maladministration which is not just a blight, but a cancer. Under Lester Bird then, there are two words in the economic vocabulary, decrease and decline. Everything worthwhile decreases and declines. Only corruption expands and expands, as well as its natural concomitant, mismanagement.
So we continue with the objective record of Lester Bird in direct opposition to his subjective gibberish in the glossy Half-Way There on which he wantonly wasted scarce public funds. Note well, I relied on objective economic data provided by the IMF, and not on what Lester Bird would call “opposition” economists.
Said the IMF of manufacturing under Lester Bird “The share of manufacturing in GDP fell from 2.8 per cent in 1990 to 2.0 percent” in 1994. Everything declines. Manufacturing, agriculture, domestic investment, foreign investment, public sector investment. Everything is in persistent decline. And yet Lester Bird had the sheer gall, the total disrespect of the public to put out a glossy publication, a complete tissue of lies, proclaiming that decline in every sector, meant growth. And growth higher than that of developed countries. It is a very sick joke. In a country where the agricultural sector does not exist in real terms, and the manufacturing sector is even less, Lester Bird said we were doing better than some developed countries. Only Pat Lewis would echo and re-echo such absolute nonsense as Biblical wisdom.
Antigua badly needs to face reality and the truth of its own condition with sober senses. That is the essential pre-requisite in economics and politics for any real development. That automatically implies that Lester Bird is our main liability. A liability that spells corruption, mismanagement, disorder in public affairs, and wanton disregard of local abilities. The truth is there for all to see, in stark opposition to Lester Bird’s boundless and baseless lies.
Last updated on 14 February 2022