by Angelina Brooks
Volume 1 Part 1
I listened to Senator Nazim Burke’s contribution on the 2014 Budget in the Upper Parliamentary Chamber only to recognize why people in his constituency rejected him in the general election of 19th February, 2013.
He didn’t really have anything positive to say, finding himself on many occasions making reference to the 1995-2008 NNP era, as if debating the Budget for that period.
A careful analysis would lead anyone to believe he is stuck in the past, failing still to acknowledge the ills that were germinated in the four-and-a-half-year demise of the NDC administration which the voters placed in the immediate past.
Nazim forgot he was debating the 2014 Budget, only to come to his true self later on to indicate he doesn’t trust Dr. Mitchell and the NNP and the World knows that that really is his main gripe in politics today.
This is when I found him, his contribution and his manner of throwing cold water on today’s Homegrown Structural Adjustment Programme politically malicious and forthrightly hypocritical.
A Tillman Thomas NDC Cabinet discussion had come up with the proposal that it is no way they could have managed the country’s affairs without the imposition of a Structural Adjustment Programme. Our citizens must be fully aware that that was their intended course of action after the country was put under severe economic turmoil with the NDC administration cracking up in front our very eyes; at the same time the NDC hierarchy remained denying that Grenadians were bawling for mercy under an already secretly-administered austerity pressure plan.
So, to make all the disparaging remarks about the NNP Programme now is like Nazim definitely “out of order”.
The thing about it is that he was conveniently attacked with a bout of short memory that avoided him from reporting to the Senate that under his stewardship Grenada was not meeting its financial obligations to the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) that caused it to be downgraded by Standard and Poors and countries pointing at Grenada as the country committing the infringement.
We must bear in mind that the CDB is a regional institution which Grenada, like other territories in the region, depends on largely for capital funding, especially in a time of need.
However, things became sour with the behavior of the ill-advised Thomas regime.
Money was in short supply, evident with the failure to pay the OECS Pharmaceutical Procurement Service for medicines for the Health of our Nation and the resulting implication is that the health sector ended up in shambles.
So limited were the Nation’s funds that salaries for public servants became scarce and a lame NDC government finding difficulty to pay on time on four consecutive occasions, without, except for once, any notice that wages would be late in coming or notice about the problems which existed at the time. Thanks to the NNP media that had to do the Government’s work so as to ease the tension and keep Grenadians informed.
It’s amazing how Nazim, in debating the 2014 Budget in the Senate, could forget that the Government which they were in control of had to desperately sell State assets cheaply to help with their commitments to pay workers. That was as crucial as it got.
All this, coupled with business at the Port drying up, were among the many major ills of the Tillman Thomas Government of which Nazim Burke was “Chief Cook and Bottle-washer”, the Minister of Finance.
With his latest utterances I am forced to concur that NDC knew nothing about the dissatisfaction of the Grenadian man, woman and child, discomforted with their style of governance, shrouded with the slogan when they won the election in 2008, “is we time now”.
In short time they forgot the people they were chosen to represent.
So when I hear Nazim saying time and time again that PM Mitchell and the NNP sold Grenadians a fairy tale that caused the NDC’s 15-seat demise, I often wonder which country was he living in and which newspaper was he reading that said to him Grenadian people stupid. Thinking like that in the first place without recognizing their shortcomings were hurting people tells you the nature of the individual. It is therefore safe to say today that they were all blinded around their leader.
What the former Minister of Finance must know is that the Grenadian voters used the power they had under the ballot and fired him, together with the others, from the governance of this dear land of ours before it sank to the abyss of total annihilation.
I think he also has to live with the fact that they chose a leader and an administration that have a track record of looking out for people and if brother Nazim hits the rewind button he would remember that in short time Grenada rebounded from the woes of hurricane Ivan and that is even tantamount to economic crises.
So, from day one, February 20, 2013 when Keith Mitchell and his Cabinet began work, the members were in a “no nonsense” mood, for they were well aware of what they were about to face.
There are positive signs of hope on the basis of how a crisis must be managed, that already in short time, Grenada has experienced a 2.7% growth rate, in stark in contrast to the negative growth experienced over the years of the NDC administration.
