Saint Lucians have reason to share their Prime Minister’s vexed concerns about what current Opposition politicians are saying and doing to devalue and undermine regional efforts to build new and better relationships between the Caribbean and Africa.
In his 2025 Emancipation Day address, Prime Minister Philip J. Pierre expressed disgust with the insulting ways the United Workers Party (UWP) treated the recent week-long visit by Nigeria’s President Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
PM Pierre rightfully denounced the disregard for diplomatic protocol shown by the leadership of the island’s second-oldest political party during a state visit by the leader of Africa’s biggest and most-populous modern state.
Citizens will also understand his inference that had it been another leader from another country, the opposition’s reception would have been warm instead of the frosty and demeaning words from UWP officials, candidates and spokespersons, on-and-off public platforms, online and offline.
The PM referred on Monday to the low grade of politics the opposition has descended — generating and sustaining talks about ‘boloms’ while the government spends time addressing the social and economic problems inherited from the same failed critics today offering to do tomorrow what they failed to over three terms in office (between 2007 and 2021).
The reasons for the PM’s sustained outrage are very-many. For example, at a global and regional level in this day and age:
• The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) has for 12 years been pursuing Reparations from Europe for Slavery and Native Genocide
• The United Nations (UN) is supporting the calls by Caribbean and African nations for reparations;
• The African Union (AU) is forging a new level of South-South Cooperation between the continent and the African Diaspora
• The UN has designated a Second Decade for People of African Descent
• An honourable Saint Lucian diplomat of international standing (Hon. Dr June Soomer) served as the first Chair of the UN’s Permanent Forum for People of African Descent
• CARICOM is building new bridges to Africa to reverse the ‘Middle Passage’ and stand the ‘Great Pyramid’ on its head like with the new links with the Afrexim Bank, Ethiopia Airlines, African energy companies and educational institutions
• Guilty companies, families and institutions in Europe and the USA are confessing their slavery sins and committing to paying penance
• Universities in the UK are offering scholarships for Reparations Studies and donating to research into diseases caused in the Caribbean by Slavery
• Caribbean nations (Barbados and Trinidad & Tobago included) are pulling-down statues of Lord Nelson and Christopher Columbus and telling the true stories of what they actually represented; and
• Kings and Royal Families in the UK and The Netherlands have publicly offered royal expressions of sorrow for their roles in slavery
President Tinubu also visited the island and the Caribbean as current Chair of the Economic Commission of West African States (ECOWAS) and is president of one of the two richest states in Africa.
Saint Lucia and other OECS member-states will also fully benefit from the agreements signed with the Nigerian President during his Saint Lucia visit, through Key Economic Collaboration Agreements, such as:
• Establishment of a joint commission to devise mechanisms for structured cooperation between Nigeria and the OECS
• Opportunities for Economic diplomacy and trade ties with Africa’s largest market
• Trade and Investment partnerships
• Maritime university collaboration
• Technical aid cooperation spanning education, health and engineering sectors
• Joint scientific research initiatives; and
• Visa Waivers
With all this happening in a Saint Lucia where this administration has initiated annual Emancipation Month celebrations and is taking African History to schools; and with the second triennium of Emancipation Month being held under a theme of getting a better understanding of our past and present to better guide our future, the opposition would have been expected to embrace the African leader, but instead they treated the state’s honoured guest as a local political football, kicking his name and reputation as hard as they could every time they could.
You’d think that apart from all the above, the fact that Saint Lucia’s distinguished son, Soufriere’s Sir Darnley Alexander, having served as the first non-Nigerian Chief Justice after independence, would have at-least helped the local opposition better understand why they shouldn’t have treated the visiting President the way they did.
But that was not to be and even today we hear sorry and lame excuses to justify the insulting attacks on the visiting head of an African state by wannabe Smart Aleks trying to make it appear the government was expecting them to give President Tinubu special treatment because he is an African or because he’s Black.
The most ridiculous excuse I heard was a statement from an Opposition candidate that: “Not all Black People are Good and Not all White People Are Bad!”
Of course, the reverse also applies (because not all Black people are bad and not all White people are good).
But the gentleman concerned, going up against a former prime minister and political leader of the party he now represents happily joined those with condescending views of the ‘little black boy’ who’s become a much-loved national leader, choosing to sound like genuflecting to his and his party’s present leader, who he several times described as “a White Man”.
Introduction of the racial comparison between the visiting African President and Saint Lucia’s current Opposition Leader is quite disingenuous, in my book, but worsened by the added infliction of false self-hate in the loud speaker’s bald and bold statement, pointing to the costly Rwanda genocidal conflict in Africa, as an example of “what Black people have done to their own people…”
Of course, silver linings always ring dark clouds and, in this case, what we have is more proof-positive that even among the brightest everywhere, there’ll always be people of African descent who simply refuse to believe Africa existed before slavery, or that Africans ruled different and greater parts of today’s world long before Jesus Christ or Christopher Columbus arrived.
Sad, but true — C’est la vie!