By Stanley Lester Pascal,VP Digital

Copyright thevoiceslu

Maybe it’s a new vibe or gig in political campaigning ‒— when your campaign is on the rocks, or nothing else is working, exercise your leaky waterworks by shedding some fake tears. Except, for Allen Chastanet, this is nothing new! In the 2016 political campaign, he sniffled and sobbed his way to an eleven to six victory in the general elections, crying about everything from the way he was being perceived by the electorate to the ‘hard life’ he had as a young man under his rich father. And Saint Lucian voters bought into his “Five to Stay Alive” campaign slogan and manifesto which promised everything but water from the moon.

And were voters duped! Another of his promises, not necessarily related to “Five to Stay Alive”, more money in people’s pockets – “ching, ching” he called it – never materialized. In fact, unemployment, especially youth unemployment, increased significantly during his more than five years in office. The economic boom Saint Lucia would experience under his stewardship, he boasted, would bring an end to Saint Lucians applying for US visas to seek betterment for themselves and their families in the US. What economic boom? When the UWP was unceremoniously dumped from office in July 2021, the Debt to GDP ratio stood at 102%. What that meant was, for every dollar earned by the country, another two cents had to be added to that to pay the country’s debts!

The universal health care coverage he promised in the 2016 campaign? Saint Lucians watched in disbelief as Chastanet brought in medical personnel from the Cayman Islands to manage the transition from Victoria Hospital (VH) to the Owen King European Hospital (OKEUH). In the process, the majority of doctors and nurses at VH were fired and asked to reapply for their positions. Sadly, many of our qualified and experienced nurses left for the US and England after that. And, to add insult to injury, he never delivered on his promise of universal health care coverage. The net result? The incoming SLP government had to settle a debt of $24 million owed to the Cayman Islands medical personnel while attempting to rebuild the VH staff complement and morale that Chastanet had ravaged.

But, if Saint Lucians thought Chastanet’s con game had come to an end when the House was prorogued in 2021, they were in for a shocker! Without batting an eyelash, Chastanet rewarmed the stale, discredited “Five to Stay Alive” worm-infested malpwoptay, and reintroduced it as “Five for Five” during the election campaign. In that bold, shameless move, he promised voters five of the same-old, same-old if they returned him to office for another five years. It was a bluff never before seen in our political history! As smooth as silk, the political fraudster pretended that his 2016 to 2021 years in office — the worst by any government before and after independence — were just an illusion, something that never happened. It was a bluff that failed! Voters decided, 15 seats to 2, they didn’t like the smell of the stuff Chastanet was shovelling and sent him crashing out of office.

So, now, he’s back. This time he believes he has figured it out. The five thing doesn’t seem to be working, so he added two to it. It has become “Seven to S.O.S.” which, translated, means “Seven to Save Our Saint Lucia”. Why? Maybe seven is a magic number. Maybe seven will produce unicorns, flying horses, fairies, and mermaids to charm voters back to him.

One thing that hasn’t changed, though, is Chastanet’s fixation with Saint Lucia’s system of health care. Notwithstanding his disastrous experiment of outsourcing our health services to Cayman Islands medical personnel during his tenure as Prime Minister, he has again made health care one of the primary planks of his 7-point plan. “Under a UWP government, every Saint Lucian will receive $75,000 annual insurance coverage,” he said glibly. And the opening lines of the poem, “Matilda, Who Told Lies and was Burned to Death” by Hilaire Belloc came to mind:

“Matilda told such dreadful lies,
It made one gasp and stretch one’s eyes;
Her aunt, who, from her earliest youth,
Had kept a strict regard for truth,
Attempted to believe Matilda:
The effort very nearly killed her…”

Folks, Saint Lucia’s population is between 180,000 and 200,000. A simple math calculation (multiplication of $75,000 by 180,000) reveals that Chastanet would have to find over $13 billion to honour such a huge promise. That’s roughly six times our annual budget! Even if the coverage amount was reduced to $25,000, he’d still have to produce $4.5 billion to meet his tongue-in-cheek largesse. That’s the equivalent of twice our annual budget! When a journalist pressed him on the figures, he resorted to a staple of his evasive, diversionary tactics, he sniffled and sobbed his way out of responding to his hoax. “I met a man who had suffered a stroke, sniff, sob… whose wife, a double amputee, sniff, sniff, sob, sob… now has to take care of him…”

Meanwhile, the self-confessed grandson of a local obeah man, who is also the deputy leader of the UWP, Guy Joseph, has dropped all pretense at offering his Party as a viable alternative to the SLP government. During one of his recent rants, he expressed the view that “blood will run…” in Saint Lucia because there are practitioners of voodoo and obeah, owners of ‘boloms’, homosexuals, lesbians, and other sexual deviants in the ranks of the SLP. Ah well…

And, if you think you’ve heard it all from the UWP, brace yourselves. They haven’t even introduced ‘Willy Outrageous’ and ‘Tanti Merle’ on their platform yet! Wait for it!