Trust And Performance

THE general elections are over and the new Allen Chastanet government has wasted no time getting its act together. Before moving on, however, tribute must be paid to the people of St Lucia for the manner in which they conducted themselves during the short campaign leading up to election day.

For instance, there were those who had predicted that there would have been political violence during the campaign, but save for a few isolated cases, there was nothing. There were others who felt that the elections would have produced a close result. That was not the case. The people voted emphatically for change as the pendulum swung decisively against the St Lucia Labour Party.

Understandably, there would have been casualties in the fight and there were many, especially those who held ministerial positions in the last government. Former Prime Minister Anthony himself must feel a sense of dejection not only over the result but equally over his performance in his Vieux Fort South constituency. June 6 must surely mark the end of a political career that had earlier held so much promise. He squandered it all. Indeed, the Labour Party of today is a poor version of that of 1997.

But there are lessons to be learnt from this election and one hopes that the members of the new government as well as those who now aspire to political office in the future, from whichever party, would have benefitted from the experience of the last five years and understand the issues which rub people the wrong way and force them to virtually take out governments. We usually say that St Lucians are cowards, that they are all talk and no action. This may be true up to a point, but politicians would do well never to make gospel out of this suggestion, because this may be, in a nutshell what caused the downfall of the St Lucia Labour Party on June 6.

The SLP lost the elections because of the quality of its performance over the entire term, its failure to make any significant dent in unemployment, its inability to turn the economy around and raise the quality of life of St Lucians at a time of creeping poverty. Let’s face it: politicians are elected to office to make life better for their people. But these failures were compounded by the lack of the simple ingredient called trust.

Trust is broken when people believe that they are being lied to; when they are not being given the facts of issues that is their business or not being taken into the confidence of their government as they expect to; trust is broken when promises made are not delivered; when double standards are employed and everything seems to be done for political expedience. Above all, trust is broken when you set a code to govern by, then turn around and kick it away and proceed to abuse your power.

Performance and trust are two ingredients in the structure of governance that St. Lucians seem to demand above all else. They build resentment in people and cause them to rebel. In the case of the St Lucia Labour Party, the irony was that having been roundly chastised by the electorate in 2006 for pursuing that agenda, it returned to power five years later and behaved the exact same way, then foolishly expected a different result.

It is amusing some of the excuses we have been hearing, even from one of our academics, why Labour lost these elections. The point is St Lucians have long been sending out signals that they were losing their patience with politicians, especially those who mess up. Those who should have picked up the hint didn’t , and that’s the reason the Labour Party is in opposition again today.