The Josie Factor: When Peter Is Not Paul!

UNLIKE others his age who’ve mounted the political stage, Peter Josie has seen and done it all – Good, Bad and Ugly – and like us all, lived to both enjoy and regret some.

Looking back on his life through his mind’s rear-view mirror, Peter won’t hesitate to admit it hasn’t been a Bed of Red Roses and that politics never turned out to be that Shining Star he looked forward to in the mid-to-late 1960s after returning Home Sweet Home from university studies abroad.

The Peter of the Black Power Era of the 1970s was the most radical exponent of African consciousness by way of his Afro hairstyle, Dashiki shirts, dark shades and talk of ‘Black Consciousness’.

However, Today’s Peter never overcame the underpinnings of the lasting effects of growing-up in the political shadows of others he considered himself different to — if not better than — in many respects.

His raw radical on-stage presentations were always outshined by the linguistic finesse of the man considered his political twin, the late George Odlum.

The Odlum-and-Josie factor brought them together on stage, but the two actors knowingly differed deeply within, Peter always given the second fiddle while George always conducted the band.

In politics, as in music, once the fiddler takes to the roof, the bandmaster will cut him loose – and so did their twin-brother relationship end with George closing-shop on Peter and the rest of the Saint Lucia Labour Party (SLP), following his loss of the ‘leadership struggle’ that followed the SLP’s historic July 2, 1979 election victory.

George abandoned the SLP and took his followers into the new Progressive Labour Party (PLP), his eyes on winning the premature General Elections forced by his felling of the SLP government and axing all possibilities of fulfilling the promises he helped shape.

George would drive the final nail into the coffin he built for Josie, through a frontpage article in his ‘Crusader’ newspaper, with a photo of Peter addressing a SLP public meeting on the Castries Market Steps, with the headline: ‘The Dog Stands Alone!’

For his part, Peter would later kiss the SLP goodbye by mounting a UWP platform in Vieux Fort, removing a red shirt, rolling it into a ball – and kicking it into the UWP crowd…

The SLP and PLP would both lose the election and the UWP returned to office with red and green icing on its cake, thanks to Odlum.

Interestingly, both Odlum and Josie would settle for top political appointments by none other than Sir John Compton, who they together launched their political careers trying (and badly failing) to replace.

Peter would become a Cabinet Minister in a UWP administration (derided by former friends as ‘Compton’s Minister for Bananas’), while George accepted appointment (in political exile) as Saint Lucia’s Ambassador to the United Nations in New York.

George would subsequently eat humble pie and return to the SLP, but not Peter, who’d switched his election sights from Castries East to Vieux Fort South.

The SLP would win its biggest post-Independence election victory in 1997, defeating the UWP 16-1 under the leadership of Dr Kenny D. Anthony, with George as MP for Castries North-East.

George would, like Peter, silently nurse bowel movements over being just an ordinary cabinet minister in a SLP administration, led by Dr Anthony and young lawyer Mario Michel, both of whom he considered below his political par.

Expectedly, George would eventually start to grumble and ramble about the party’s leadership, with a narrative that ‘The only way we can from the top is down’, later stepping-down (largely due to illness) and selling the SLP’s loss of two seats in the 2001 General Elections as ‘The start of the end for the SLP, under Kenny…’

I can’t remember if Peter attended George’s funeral, but like his departed former partner, he also held-on to their mutual unapologetic, raw and pure (personal and/or partisan political) hatred for Dr Anthony and the SLP.

That Peter has lived to see Dr Kenny D. Anthony and Philip J. Pierre both become (together and at the same time) the longest-serving, consistently-reelected Members of Parliament in Saint Lucia today, can’t be a pleasant Josie thought – nor that each represents a constituency he contested (Castries East and Vieux Fort South). 

Not that Peter has lived his post-Labour, pro-UWP life in grief: he’s written his memoirs and an interesting fictional account of the Reparations for Slavery discussion in Saint Lucia; and he occasionally mounts the only political platform that accommodates him in 21st Century Saint Lucia, to continue living the ‘Judas’ role Odlum ascribed to him before the two Iscariots sat at different ends of the table for their last political suppers.

Josie’s sights have remained focused on Dr Anthony, whose face he behaves like seeing in daily nightmares of his long nights over decades of pursuit of elusive power.

Like Donald Trump, Peter obviously feels he’s above the law and has earned the right to say whatever he likes or hates about ‘Kenny’ without having to account.

Trump is learning, the hard way, that while Freedom of Speech is a universal guarantee, it’s a totally different ‘kettle of fish’ to actually call on people to break the law.

Dr Anthony’s call for Josie to be arrested and charged is simply a genuine appeal for the law to be applied to one and all, as equal to Peter as to any Paul.

However, like he said, it’s most likely Peter will slip away, simply because, in this case, he isn’t Paul.

Meanwhile, the UWP has offloaded Josie like a hot potato, apologizing profusely for his statements at their press conference, pointing out, in an official statement, he was only “a guest” — and referring to statements “inciting violence” being “unacceptable” to the party and “undermining the democratic values we all hold dear.” 

Facing possible legal trouble, the UWP has left Peter to hang, high and dry!