As Christmas and 2025 Celebrations approach, we’re naturally wondering what’ll happen at home and across the world next year. As per usual, let’s look over the horizon here, there and everywhere, at what’s likely to happen in Saint Lucia, Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) and on Planet Earth, at the end of the First Quarter of Century 21. These are not predictions, but forecasts that’ll vary according to how tides flow and winds blow, in an unpredictable year everywhere:
SAINT LUCIA:
1. Saint Lucia will continue its advance to a secure future under the leadership of Prime Minister Philip J. Pierre for another year before General Elections due in 2026, best seen in its projection for 4.3% growth in the 2024-2025 – and his intention to complete incomplete national projects inherited, like the Hewanorra International Airport (HIA), St. Jude Hospital, Halls of Justice, Millennium-Cul-de-Sac Highway, as well as restoring the excised 5th Wing of the OKEU Hospital.
2. Philip J. Pierre will continue being ‘The Best Prime Minister Saint Lucia Never Had’ by doing more as the Servant Leader for All and Leader of a Party and Government guided by a philosophy of Putting People First.
3. Prime Minister Pierre will face new and old challenges in 2025, including considering whether to consider a Cabinet Reshuffle and the sustainability of sustaining diplomatic ties with Taiwan — which is not recognized by the United Nations (UN), since it’s not an independent nation.
4. The Philip J. Pierre administration will maintain its record for delivering the most election campaign promises, through parliament and for the benefit of all, by any ruling party since Independence.
5. The Opposition will have to ‘Put up, or Shut up’ on their accusations regarding Saint Lucia’s Citizenship by Investment (CIP) programme and will continue its years-long unsuccessful pursuit of forcing Deputy Prime Minister Ernest Hilaire out of politics through allegations his accusers have failed to prove.
6. 2024 Olympics 100-meter Women’s Gold Winner Julien Alfred will continue sealing her place as Saint Lucia’s 1st National Hero of the 21st Century.
7. Local entrepreneur Rayneau Gadjadhar will continue riding the regional waves with his recently acquired barges and tugs from China; other forward-looking local and family-owned businesses will do likewise with the expanding list of government incentives to the private sector; as will the scores of successful youth entrepreneurs participating in hundreds of Youth Economy projects, facilitated by the Youth Economy Agency (YEA) and creating employment opportunities for thousands; and
8. The Royal Saint Lucia Police Force will continue to yield good news under its new commissioner.
REGIONALLY:
1. Guyana will continue leading the way in showing what Good Governance can bring and continue proving wrong the claim that poor nations cannot handle riches from their natural resources.
2. Venezuela will continue its return to normalcy after a national Christmas 2024 celebration intended to be like never before.
3. Guyana and Venezuela will agree that a political solution is better than any military exchange in continuing efforts to solve or resolve a centuries-old neighbourly disagreement that’s reached its highest heights.
4. Grenada will learn the ropes about what it’ll take to join Guyana and Surinam as the newest finders of oil and gas within CARICOM, alongside T&T, further propelling CARICOM as the fastest-growing region worldwide, thanks mainly to Guyana.
5. CARICOM will have to consider redefining its global relationships in a new, rapidly unfolding, quickly-changing and unpredictable global dispensation.
6. Small Island Developing States in CARICOM and the wider Caribbean region will up their ante in the demands for Loss and Damage from the Global North for continuing accelerated Climate Change.
7. CARICOM will also face considerable challenges to its traditional relationships with the European Union and G-7 states.
8. CARICOM’s quest for Reparations from Britain and Europe for Slavery and Native Genocide will face new challenges with the current Labour Government that’s at one with the Opposition Conservatives in London on absolutely denying all such related claims.
9. The three CARICOM nations involved will have to decide on the wisdom of continuing participation in the US-backed and UN-supported multinational security force in Haiti, led by dissatisfied Kenyans.
10. The five remaining CARICOM member-states with ties with Taiwan will, like never before, have to consider whether to re-examine the long-term value of ties with Taipei.
INTERNATIONAL
1. The Trump 2.0 Presidency will shake the world in many ways that’ll surprise many everywhere.
2. The BRICS nations will continue to expand their cooperation as representatives of the most people, with the most natural and human resources on Planet Earth.
3. African nations will have to decide whether to keep going with the flow and swim against the tide or follow new routes set by recent popular changes, especially in the Sahel region.
4. Small Island Developing States (SIDS) globally will do more together to get more attention to and action on the growing need to ensure earlier Loss and Damage reparations and compensation from the Global North.
5. The pressures will be greater and deeper for an urgent end to the Ukraine War, Israel’s Genocide Against Gaza and its War on Lebanon, the war in Sudan and an early peaceful transfer in Syria.
6. Demands will grow louder for European libraries and nations to return African and Indian Treasures stolen by Empires.
7. Asian and Pacific nations will have to adjust to new changes and possibly tough times in the South and East China Seas.
8. More nations will continue to better understand what China’s President Xi Jinping’s Global Cooperation Initiative (GCI) and the Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) are all about
9. Taiwan will come very close to provoking China into acting decisively to prevent the artificial separation of the island from the mainland; and
10. The Robotics Revolution will start dominating the world, in peace and war, for good and bad.