BECA– USE of the love for our island, we, as a group of senior citizens and youngsters, have felt it necessary to get together to put forward our heartfelt thoughts on the state of affairs in the country. Through our years of experience working and living on this island, we are still able to think and contribute and be creative, truthful and analytical.
Therefore, we, the senior citizens and the youngsters who respect us for our contributions and legacy expect through this medium over the coming months to bare our souls and tell the St Lucian public exactly how we feel and give you the truth which we have gathered from the people on the ground.
Our research has supported our observation that the country is ailing badly – in terms of peace and security, in informed policies, spiritual and ethical values, the right and proper growth and development of our younger persons and the quality of life for thousands of unemployed, the poor, and those who have given up hope.
So, sons and daughters of Saint Lucia, we will address you in the newspapers monthly, and on social media. We believe that all of you who have the future of your country at heart, will be more convinced than ever that we all have to ensure that we stop the unceasing downslide into destruction. We hope that like us you are waiting to exhale. You cannot afford to be blind to the glaring facts.
Problems St. Lucian Youth Face
Youth today are affected by numerous issues that affect their long term development, social skills, physical and mental health, and consequently their overall success. Starting at infancy, a lack of funding, poor accessible resources and the apparent lack of interest and genuine concern by governments for the well-being of today’s young people, can create an environmental plague of hopelessness and despair. By the time the majority of these children reach adolescence and young adulthood, they have fallen into the cyclical lifestyle which defines much of our population: a lifestyle marked by poverty, unemployment {an incredible 50% mark in St. Lucia}, crime, poor physical and mental health and even suicide. The continuation of short term employment policies and the lack of developing our youth, could only exacerbate St. Lucia’s future and reduce our chances of raising capable and successful citizens.
The most concerning and deliberating issues affecting youth today stem from inaccessibility to effective social programmes and resources that can better support children and families in various domains. Areas of need include:
Education and support for single parent households.
Providing mental health support and counselling for at risk and troubled youth.
Support rehabilitative, as opposed to solely punitive measures for delinquent kids.
Facilitating social, educational and athletic extra curriculum activities.
Promoting on-going research in child development.
Developing the discipline of sports. This will not only provide youth with avenues to experience and produce sentiments of national pride, but with emphasis on procuring assistance and sponsorship, may also lead to scholarships providing strong incentives for youth to get involved.
Job training and social programmes geared at promoting higher education, skill development and training. This can ensure that the youth are better prepared for the work force. These assets, along with career resources can help to provide effective avenues for securing gainful employment or entrepreneurial services as well as avenues for advancement.
By strengthening these areas and initiatives, we can concurrently provide youth with hope and ambition, which could also help reduce mental health issues and complacency, and produce positive, ambitious and productive youth.
Why this Government is not doing enough
It comes as no surprise that St Lucia’s economy is the weakest performing in the Caribbean. An economic analysis conducted by economists, and other professionals, on behalf of their employer, which for now will remain unnamed, has confirmed the obvious: that St Lucia’s economic indices portray a bleak outlook for our country when compared with other Caribbean nations.
Among our regional counterparts St Lucia’s economy and Grenada’s are still struggling while Dominica, St Kitts and Nevis and St Vincent are in recovery mode. In fact those countries are the only ones in the (ECCU) that are appearing to register significant improvements in activity in the first quarter of 2015 while farther afield Jamaica and the Cayman Islands are recording expansion. Belize has recorded a small contraction.
The preliminary figures for the Bahamas and Trinidad and Tobago suggest slow progress while official estimates show no improvement in Barbados.
Let us take a closer look at St Lucia’s performance:
Mixed fortunes across sectors in St Lucia in 2014 resulted in no growth in total economic value added during 2014 after a decline in economic activity of 2.3% in 2013.
• Construction activity fell marginally during the first quarter of 2014 evidenced by falling credit for construction from commercial banks. Public sector building was limited to slope stabilization works on the Barre d’ Lisle and other areas, construction of a few bridges and work on the St Jude’s Hospital and some work on the Ministry of Finance buildings. Manufacturing output was primarily hurt by 25% less exports of mainly beverages relative to 2013.
• Activity in tourism softened the blow from declines in construction and manufacturing, with stay over and cruise arrivals expanding 6% and 5.4% over the six months of last year. Increased airlift resulted in a 13.2% expansion in stay over arrivals from the USA while increases were also registered for arrivals from Canada (9.4%) and Europe (7.2%). However arrivals from other markets fell 15.5% in total, reflecting continued weakness in the Caribbean market.
• Investment in non-banana agriculture led to increased value added in the agriculture sector during 2014 despite a 23.6% reduction in banana production attributed to the December 2013 Christmas eve trough and other weather events.
• Prices rose by 3.6% due in most part to VAT and the resulting increase in the price of housing, utilities, Gas & fuels (4.7%). During 2014 the unemployment rate is estimated to have risen to 24.9%, 3.5% higher than a year earlier.
• Total public sector debt reached US1.020.6Billion by March 2014, US$0.4Million higher than at the end of 2013. Central Government borrowing from external sources was primarily responsible for the increase.
Outlook:
The ECCB expects another economic contraction in St Lucia in 2015 as delays to both public sector and private sector initiatives dampen construction activity.
However improving global conditions, increased airlift capacity and planned sporting events are set to propel robust growth in tourism, as we are seeing presently, led by increased arrivals from the major source markets. Events in the Middle East, the plane crashes and conflict in the Far East and Ukraine and the dreaded Ebola Virus in Africa along with a dreadful winter in North America, have all been diverting tourists away from those areas and thankfully to the Caribbean.
Finally the Central Bank projects that government’s fiscal deficit should narrow on account of increased efforts at fiscal consolidation and improved tax revenue intake through higher VAT receipts and collection of arrears.
Not good news at all. St Lucia continues to be a weak performer on the segmented GDP performance scale while Government increases taxation, reduces public spending and incurs additional debt on the taxpayer.
Where inflation is concerned the Island should have been seeing declining commodity prices due to weak domestic demand and declining global commodity prices however this has not been the case either due to the importers not passing on the price reductions to the final consumer or due to the fact that they are trying to recover losses made upon the introduction of VAT in 2012.
We are beginning to hear the cries of St Lucians who are frustrated at the high cost of living. A recent reduction in the price of gas after major protests was a welcome cut despite that reduction not being in line with anticipated reductions on the global scene. St Lucia is one of the most expensive destinations in the Caribbean with about the highest inflation, along with Jamaica and Trinidad &Tobago.
What is worrying is that Government has not been making sustainable efforts toward the relief of those oppressive conditions on the Business Sector which is the real engine of Growth in the economy. Businesses continue to struggle with the reduced demand for their services and the ever increasing taxes which threaten to topple their investments and render many more St Lucians unemployed. It is high time that Government starts to treat St Lucian Businesses with the favour that the foreign ones are benefiting from, lest their strong business legacy be destroyed and St Lucians are further thrown into the pits of despair and poverty. All for the furtherance of political gain at the expense of progress.
St. Lucia has many ‘’talented’’ people in our own midst, but common sense and business sense are more important for adopting policies that would produce results. Most of our past business establishments were started by hardworking citizens with no academic degrees but with strength of character, astuteness and honesty; likewise most of the politicians of the past. With all the ‘best brains’ in government, why then is St. Lucia lacking in so many areas? Is the focus on themselves and not on the country?
Look out for us next month – go ahead, take a few deep breaths and remain calm in the meantime.
By Sons and Daughters of St. Lucia
Are you babies in Russian Style swaddling crib garments or USA style Pampers and Luvs.
What’s the difference you ask?
Wahl, the Russian style of a tight whole body swaddle kept babies super warm in their cold often frigid apartments. However, fgreedom of movement was severely curtailed. Kinda like their Iron Curtain policy of the rececent past.
Pampers and Luvs provide incredible variety and accentuate FREEDOM of movement.
Why a nursery anthology to match your infantile article?
BEC– USE your article is just that a spoiled brat crying waa waa waa waaaaaaaaa
YIKES 🙁
Are you guys couriers for Pea-ta Josie
And you promise to repeat this TORTURE drivel again , next month.
HELLO. High Noon is swiftly approaching and you guys cannot groom a Randolph Scott or Gary Cooper as election campaign suitor?
The best you have is reformulated Josie and Feedee Klim?
Wake up people, you need to stump with authentic planks on this here campaign trail.
The crying game is long played out (nice movie about Irish politics).
Your drivel reads like a chorus of SISSY MARYs
I pause -till your next month round of Fu Manchu torture chamber.:(
Start dismantling the St. Lucia baby-making machine.
1) Give the females women much longer time in schools —pre-k,
through to university.
2) Rigorously establish and document paternity; any male with more
than two children should BY LAW a get free but legally mandatory
vasectomy
Saint Lucians do not understand that the country is overpopulated for
the limited resources that it has. And our sex addicted population of
males and females just keep on breeding like mere rabbits.
Unlike China, the males and not the females are really to blame. Our
females enter into relationships to feed the children that they already
have, but wind up making more and more fatherless children, who
just abandoning . It is like just something in our slave past that we
cannot seem to improve upon.
So here we are saddled with a very youthful untrainable population of
under 18s, just a lot of children that are hellbent on just producing
a lot more children. The Catholic Church is part of the problem of just
wanting more Catholics. We wind up with more mouths to feed and not
the wherewithal to both feed and educate them—-properly. So they turn
to crime and engage in anti-social behaviour such as cursing the police
filling their very empty heads and lives with gang warfare.
Hey Babies.
ALL your complaints and demands describe the design and function of a TOTALITARIAN form of GOVERNMENT , oui!
Yet your handlers continuously paint the LEADER of current gov in former USSR raiment.
That is the more you want government to do- the more like Stalin you need
The less involvement by government -the more like Kennedy you are.
Is that not DOUBLE SPEAK or as we commoners more directly label your behavior
Viz Yez – Sans Haunt- MALONETTE
Please locate a LATRINE – use it instead of publishing this lar-gy-jit 🙁
Lovence/
Hence the need for off island rehabilitation penal colony. A sort of exile on main street effect will provide the youthful offenders with the necessary withdrawal from the festering self fulfilling prophecy of the vicious helix of criminal behavior and oppositional defiance.
You asserted a hallmark of earand its effects pn boysly dysfunctional development that could easily fill volumes of relevant vignettes: Abandonment of parents, in particular the father and its pervasive effects on boys.
You also hinted at the failure of too liberal as in subliminally permissive traditional StLucia religion. The confessional box has become the fast checkout line of self justified redemption. Seems like powerful negative reinforcement of both criminal behaviors and maladaptive sociological practices. Take another in depth analytical review of the Movie “The Godfather” or better still the Novel of the same name. The socio-pathic criminal and sociologically depraved indifference exhibited seems supported by the main characters rch rituals.
I bet you know many folks who attend church on Sunday with fervent devotion (to being present if not seen) but come Monday at work they resume their dagger in the back destabilizing of their work environment 🙁 It’s as if the Church a
It’s as if Church attendance reinforces their perverse need to be hell raisers among their coworkers. If one is not going to practice the humility and harmony of the Prince of Peace, then church is merely an extension of the SHOPPING MALL. Your Red Carpet or Cat walk presentation celebrating “Me Myself and I are Materialistic Girls and Boys” a la Madonna.
So, if a boy cannot provide Chanel , Givenchy or Movado to himself and Victoria Secretn for his lassie from the Rodney Mall uuuum glass steel cathedral then misdemeanors and intermittent felonies must suffice. After all he can use the confessional box at La Clery church or the Basilica on Micoud St to wash away (guilt /shame / responsibility) for his transgressions.
I close with a not to distant past example of using the perceived moral spiritual summit of the church to commit supreme transgressions against humanity (the Orinoco tribes (Tainos/Arawaks) today should sue in the Hague for pain and suffering at the very least) :
Each time ships landed at a new world location to conquer /subjugate the locals -the soldiers with a member of the clergy in tow would read IN LATIN !!!!:( a proclamation (previously ratified by papal bull (to settle the colonial avarice between Spain &v Portugal) “\F you do not convert to her Majesties (Ferdee /Is so bella) religion (right now) we soldiers have the right to plunder and brutalize you and future generations with merciless abandon”.
Let the atrocities begin- sela!