It was always just a matter of time before Saint Lucia’s political opposition, ahead of an election it can’t see any way of winning by the ballot, would choose to take advantage of Saint Lucians’ natural general fear of the unknown and belief in superstition to try to score political points.
The stage had already been cleared by the national obsession with continuing discussion, debate and disbelief associated with the viral spread of various audio recordings said to be parts of an apparently secretly-recorded confession by a woman possessed by ‘evil spirits’.
As if it wasn’t enough that several families of deceased persons now have reason to doubt the veracity of the causes of death officially stated on the Death Certificates from medical practitioners and the police and justice systems being in a legal quandary on how to extract and use credible scientific evidence from an allegedly ‘possessed’ person, the opposition United Workers Party (UWP) and its propagandists (online and offline) tried their best to place the visit by an important African Head of State in a superstitious light.
As if to wear badges of shame on their chests, supposedly-intelligent persons, including members of the leadership of the opposition, hapless election candidates and hopeless hopefuls drew-up and acted on several measures and statements that would have left every conscious and concerned Saint Lucian – including a growing number of opposition supporters — nothing but shame and embarrassment.
It had to upset Saint Lucians who know anything about diplomatic protocol to know that a party that’s sometimes elected to run the nation’s affairs would complain and take issue with the brief airport closures and possible traffic delays by the 25-vehicle convoy after President and his large delegation touched-down.
In a most-disgraceful insult to a visiting Head of State of a nation of 300 million people and some of the largest natural resources across the continent and coming to represent all of the AU’s 50+ member states, the UWP’s online propagandists created an IT image of President Ahmed Tinubu flying to Saint Lucia on a broom – portraying him as a powerful practitioner of ‘Black Magic’.
Naturally, President Tinubu didn’t land on a broom — but even so, faithful UWP supporters tapped their faith to suggest online that the intermittent showers that arrived with him were not proverbial Christian ‘Showers of Blessing, but instead ‘a curse’ by God.
However, Saint Lucians, Nigerians, Africans, Caribbean people — and the whole wide world — watched the live-streamed official welcome ceremony with full military honours, at the Hewanorra International Airport.
And like with every such visit by a major foreign leader to any nation, Saint Lucia provided a fitting welcome to President Tinubu — who’s not only Nigeria’s President, but also the current Chair of the Economic Commission of West African States (ECOWAS).
ECOWAS comprises 15 African States (Benin, Burkina Faso, Capo Verde, Cote d’Ivoire, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Togo) and the Nigerian leader is visiting Saint Lucia for an entire week, less than three months before the 2nd CARICOM-African Union (AU) Summit in Ethiopia on September 7.
The visiting leader was commissioned by the AU and ECOWAS to engage with Caribbean leaders in Saint Lucia to consolidate progress started in September 2021, while CARICOM’s Secretary General Dr Carla Barnett was visiting Nigeria with a similar message: of deepening and widening Africa-Caribbean connections.
When President Tinubu landed in Saint Lucia last Saturday, Secretary-General Barnett had, just days before, addressed the 32nd Afreximbank Annual Meeting being held in Abuja, Nigeria (June 25-28).
The AGN’s theme was ‘Progressive Unity in a Fractured World: Building a Global African Coalition for Development’ and while Dr Barnett was on her way back to the Caribbean, President Tinubu and his delegation was meeting in Saint Lucia on Monday with leaders of the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS), to address similar bilateral and multilateral Caribbean-Africa issues.
CARICOM actually postponed its 2025 summit in Jamaica this year to next week (July 6-8) to allow host Prime Minister Philip J. Pierre and other OECS leaders to report on the important regional engagement with the top African leader.
But Saint Lucia’s major opposition party opted to execute a national propaganda drive against the visit, personally denigrating the visiting leader and freely making claims they can’t validate or verify, including that Prime Minister Pierre and the Saint Lucia government are hosting a corrupt politician despised in his country – also even suggesting his holiday-state visit is a deliberate evasive ploy, to avoid facing troubles at home.
The UWP’s online supporters also fabricated an online poster describing the Joint Session of the Saint Lucia Parliament (House and Senate) to be addressed by the President and Prime Minister as a conference of ‘scammers’.
Yet, UWP Leader and Opposition Leader Allen Chastanet, his sole fellow elected UWP MP Bradley Felix and their outfitted Senators all (proudly, shamefully or shamelessly) accepted the official invitations and attended the same Joint Session their propagandists disgustingly painted as ‘A Conference of Scammers’.
But none of that is new to Saint Lucia — or the UWP.
The party is particularly remembered for a public display of what organizers (back-then) described as a ‘spiritual initiation’ of their Party Leader ahead of a previous General Elections, using the party’s colours to send an Indian spiritual message that the UWP would have won — because of its blessed colour.
That public ceremony featured everything from veils and incenses to blessings from ‘the spirits’.
In a similar other display of using fears of superstition to influence voters, the UWP deployed a bunch of ‘spiritual soldiers’ — with brooms — to sweep Castries City’s streets clean of ‘demons’.
UWP spokespersons also repeatedly publicly claimed that the wife of a sitting Saint Lucia Prime Minister was the head of a powerful secret gathering of Caribbean Witches
The current campaign for the next Saint Lucia General Elections (date yet to be set) is already in full swing — and the UWP’s platform spokespersons are already talking about “Boloms” – midgets with spiritual powers at the beck-and-call of their masters or mistresses, to perform Acts of Evil.
Of course, it’s all the usual traditional so-called ‘Pork Barrel’ (now ‘Chicken and Rum’) Caribbean political theatre.
But it’s just a small reminder of just-how-far some politicians and political parties will go to play and prey on superstition to exploit people’s genuine fears – all for politics.