Another Football Game

They’re doing it again, the politicians: sufficiently confusing the issues surrounding an event to an extent where none of us is able to decipher what is going on – and then using that event as a political football, each party trying to throw blame on the other in order to score points.
We have seen it happen with almost every major event that takes place in the country.
This time, it is the Piton World Heritage site that seems to have drawn the short straw and has been elected to take the drop-kicks from one end to the other of the political playing field.
Reading an account of the goings-on of the last several days – that have been devoted almost exclusively to the ventilation of opinions, allegations and accusations swirling around the construction of a residential structure in the area between the Pitons (stories featuring on the front page of this issue of The VOICE) – one is staggered to see (even after reams of paper have been written and interminable hours of air time been employed in discussion by those in the know, those who seek to know and those who should know) how far away from any form of enlightenment we all seem to be concerning the situation.

Between the UWP laying the blame on the SLP administration for approving in June 2006 an Alien’s Landholding License containing a clause that stated a period during which the purchasers were called on to undertake construction, to the SLP pointing out that whatever paperwork was produced (or not produced) between the purchasers and the Development Control Authority (DCA) took place after the December 2006 elections … and therefore while the UWP was in power, so that permission to build is being credited (debited?) to each adversary’s account, to the admission that the zone in which the construction was taking place was admissible for the activity, to demands by the SLP for the resignation of the DCA Board, to innuendo that political influence was invoked through personal connections, the ball is being kicked from Gros Piton to Petit Piton and back again.
In the meantime, the St. Lucian populace waits to see what the outcome of the game will be … the final booby prize being the possible loss of our World Heritage designation for the Piton area.
Our surviving Nobel Laureate, the Hon. Derek Walcott once warned against the “rape of Fair Helen”, describing the Pitons as being her proud breasts.
What our politicians are presently doing may not strictly qualify as “rape”, but in their game of football, they certainly are kicking her around.