As the longest-serving MP in the Cabinet of Ministers, Prime Minister Philip J. Pierre has a very-long memory – which explains why he well knows, more than most of his ministerial colleagues, that when it comes to governments delivering the goods, people (and not only voters) tend to have very-short memories.
Having learned that lesson in Cabinet in the first two terms of the Kenny D. Anthony administration (1997 to 2006), PM Pierre isn’t about to forget to always remember that citizens don’t always care to remember.
But, not one to boast either, his approach to governance is underlined by his understanding that people elect governments to serve-well and deliver ruling parties’ election promises.
So, instead of boasting about the ruling Saint Lucia Labour Party (SLP) already having an enviable record of delivering the most election campaign manifesto promises by any ruling party since Independence in its first three years of its current term, he studiously follows its mantra of ‘Putting People First’.
This administration has delivered SLP election manifesto promises at every sitting of the House of Assembly since August 2021.
This PM is also managing government business in a way that dollars are well-earned and well-spent, reversing employment/unemployment figures and increasing the number of persons – working and pensioned – who benefit from every National Budget he’s presented.
But while keeping his eyes on the numbers, PM Pierre is also keeping them on the ball, including monitoring developments in Education and Health.
Last week, he reminded the press that it was a previous SLP administration that introduced Universal Education from infant to secondary levels and built the Dame Pearlette Louisy Secondary School at Union to start doing-away with the deprivations of the inherited so-called ‘Shift System’ that reduced students to half-a-day of school.
Same with the Health sector – and not only because this PM feels it’s potentially unhealthy to be on the wrong side of nurses and doctors, but because he also remembers it was a previous SLP administration that introduced the concepts of Universal Health and Universal Health Insurance.
This Prime Minister was part of the Labour Administration that set out to build the new OKEU, the Millennium Heights Complex and St. Jude Hospitals – and now leads the one delivering St. Jude decades after its destruction by fire on September 9, 2009.
It’s approaching 15 years – three government terms – since the St. Jude fire and it’s taken this administration to start ensuring the George Odlum Olympic Stadium eventually also upgrades to Olympic Standards after Julien Alfred brought Olympic Gold and Silver home.
Work is proceeding apace on transforming the glorified ‘shoe box’ this administration inherited at St. Jude into the central Southern-based medical institution it was meant to be for the entire region south of Soufriere and Dennery.
Prime Minister Pierre also remembers it was a previous SLP administration (of which he was Deputy Prime Minister) that prefaced all these new hospitals and medical institutions with Prime Minister Dr Kenny D. Anthony seeking and getting assistance from Cuba to prepare to adequately staff the new medical institutions and facilities with professional nurses, doctors and medical technicians.
He remembers too, Dr Anthony reporting to Cabinet that it was none-other-than President Fidel Castro who agreed to build a new medical training school in Cuba’s Matanzas Province to train at least 400 nurses (male and female) for Saint Lucia’s new hospitals.
And he remembers he was also part of the administration that convinced the European Union (EU) to adopt the Owen King-European Union (OKEU) project as the biggest it ever funded in the Eastern Caribbean.
So, when Prime Minister Pierre hears nurses and doctors publicly complaining about conditions at OKEU, it breaks his heart – as he remembers it was a previous United Workers Party (UWP) administration that started a process of severely dismembering the OKEU and slicing its veins before, during and after construction.
He clearly remembers it was also an earlier UWP administration, with Dr Keith Mondesir as Health Minister, that unilaterally extended the stay of 400 newly-qualified Saint Lucian nurses trained at Matanzas on government scholarships – at great cost to their parents and guardians and greater distress to the already-trained nurses forced by Regime Change to spend another two years in Cuba.
(It was suggested by defenders of the action that this was necessary to protect the jobs of aging nurses nearing retirement ahead of the next elections, but I will not use this argument here…)
But worse was yet to come…
Dr Mondesir’s Health Ministry officiated over the painful unilateral surgical extraction of one of the ‘five fingers’ (extended wings) the OKEU was originally designed to be – and with it, loss of all the facilities, rooms and space that could very-well have made a positive difference today.
Now, we hear the UWP and its mindless propagandists forgetfully hollering that the OKEU hospital was opened, under their watch, with less beds than Victoria Hospital that it replaced – and run by an outsources and unheard-of Cayman Island-based Asian group contractually paid millions to extract millions more from citizens and the Treasury.
Undoing the serious bodily harm further exacted on the OKEU in just one five-year term under the previous administration should take much-longer, as this is about engaging in life-saving long-term emergency restorative surgery to save the island’s biggest hospital from UWP government wounds.
But, never forgetting that the Health of a Nation is never a matter of partisan competition, Prime Minister Pierre just-the-other-day issued a stern warning – with a deadline – to the Minister and Ministry of Health to attend to certain matters of urgent public concern at OKEU.
I have no doubt that minister and ministry heard loud-and-clear, but while the clock is ticking, Saint Lucians cannot afford to forget to remember from whence we cometh!
Abodie Abofess… (‘All that said…’) can anyone blame this administration for the unhealthy situation at OKEU?
Methinks not!