Prime Minister Philip J. Pierre flew to Taiwan yesterday, where, among other things, he’ll thank the island’s administration for recently providing $20 million to Saint Lucia for investing in affordable housing.
With direct US and UK aid flows today, nothing anywhere near what they used to be and when affordable housing is as-much a problem here as in Europe and across the USA and fellow Caribbean nations, $20 million will go a-long-way in helping the government deliver on its promise to make it easier for Saint Lucians to afford building or purchasing their own homes.
This administration has indeed done all it can, within increasingly-restricted limits, to make building or owning a home more affordable, by removing or lowering taxes on building materials where possible, while also making it easier for young persons to borrow to invest in buying or building.
But with prices rising with almost every shipment of building materials imported by the private sector thanks to Supply Chain issues and other uncontrollable factors, there’s always a limit to which the government can go.
The Prime Minister made exactly that point at last Monday’s weekly press conference, where he again pointed out that his administration continues going heads-over-heels to keep fuel and cooking gas prices affordable for all citizens — from users of 20-pound and 100-pound tanks, to users of kerosene, gas and diesel.
This government also continues spending millions of dollars subsidising household energy prices, in the process reducing its earnings by as-many millions, while having to find those same dollars elsewhere to continuing funding social programs, like in the health sector and for expenditure on justice, security and other non-income earning sectors, including education.
Take electricity, for example, where the government has to pay its own light bills across-the-board like ever consumer, in a situation where electricity costs rise almost monthly – and has to be paid, by law, not by LUCELEC as a cost of doing business, but by every Saint Lucian connected to the company’s national electricity grid.
Thanks to the decades-old Fuel Surcharge law that requires consumers to pay the company’s entire fuel bill, LUCELEC has become the envy of its competitors regionally, as the only electricity company with such a heavenly gift that ensures it’ll never, ever, run at a loss.
In this age when fuel prices continue to hover above US $100 per barrel — thanks to the US and Israel’s war against Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz preventing 20% of the world’s needed oil from flowing through — the global energy crisis that started on the last day of February 2026 continues affecting every corner of the world, but especially small-island states like Saint Lucia and all other Caribbean islands and nations that don’t produce oil.
Even Guyana, as the region’s biggest oil producer, is unable to shield its consumers from the high energy prices, thanks to dominance of its oil extraction by mainly American oil companies only interested in keeping their profit-margins growing.
Likewise, Trinidad & Tobago, where profitable oil production is now a distant dream of past times when its governments boasted that ‘Oil can’t spoil’ and told island like Saint Lucia that the twin-island republic was ‘not an ATM for the OECS’.
The Saint Lucia government and the private sector are also crippled by the Electricity Supply Act and related regulations that prevent any investment in alternative energy – meaning that even if the government was to get geothermal energy flowing from the Sulphur Springs, or produced kinetic energy by harvesting sunshine, or using windmills to generate power, it wouldn’t be able to sell even one kilowatt at lower prices to consumers because, by law, only LUCELEC can sell electricity.
Against that background and with both hands cuffed behind its back, all the government can do is appeal to LUCELEC to have mercy on its consumers — and that’s exactly what Prime Minister Pierre told the press he’ll do, indicating at his Monday press conference that his administration plans to sit with the company to discuss how-best to reduce electricity prices.
The PM also indicated the opposition – even with one man in parliament – is wholly invited to contribute to any meaningful discussion that can yield plausible ideas.
All this is happening at a time when the world is facing a possibility that the continuing threats by the US and Israel to continue the war against Iran and the increasing inability of Saudi Arabia to export oil through the Mandab Strait and the Suez Canal are causing nations to tap their energy reserves — to such an extent that they’re clearly and wholly threatened.
The situation facing Europe and the US is such that the Trump administration has had to cut a deal with Russia to help store-up its own near-empty reserves, while American companies are being assisted by Washington to purchase the Russian-owned Nordstream pipelines bombed out of action at the start of the Ukraine war, to now allow the US to continue replacing Russia as the main supplier of oil to Europe.
All these events daily affect Saint Lucians, who must continue paying more for electricity and other public utilities.
But, the government simply cannot forever continue subsiding kerosene, gasoline, diesel and cooking gas and will at some point have to yield to the uncontrollable forces that will come as world oil prices continue rising – and soon above US $100 per barrel.
However, instead of trying to get the protected public to understand the implications of the global energy crisis for everyone — irrespective of which political party they support — the local opposition continues babbling energetically and misleading its supporters into believing that the fault lies with a government that continues keeping the economy running well, despite all odds.
But as the saying goes, if you spit in the sky it’ll fall in your eye – and that’s exactly the truth unfolding from the Towers of Babble!