Unkept Promises?
By Micah George

The opposition St. Lucia Labour Party yesterday took the Government to task for its inability to govern the country and in contradicting its election promises to the people.
Opposition parliamentarians Phillip J Pierre and Alva Baptiste yesterday told reporters that since its election last December the “UWP Government has embarked on a course that blatantly contradicts what it had made the people of this country believe”.
“It started increasing recurrent expenditure by appointing an overly bloated Cabinet where every UWP elected member and senator was given a ministerial appointment of one form or another. That has been followed by placing every other UWP candidate in positions paid for by the public purse. In addition all controls have been removed from the use of government vehicles and the ministers have travelled with the frequency never before seen in Government,” the men said.
The two, who held a press conference yesterday at the offices of the Leader of the Opposition, noted that the situation has been compounded by several ill-advised decisions that now place tremendous pressure on the Government treasury and have resulted in a desperate search for measures to find new sources of revenue.

The two gave a list of actions taken by Government that have added the pressure on them to find additional revenue, such as increasing departure tax at airports by 95 per cent, paying half a million dollars in advance to one of its supporters in the name of six months rent, hiring James Hepple as a consultant for $1.22 million dollars, paying three million dollars for boxing at Beausejour with none of the additional tourists promised by the Minister for Tourism.
The two added that the loss of $104 million of capital budget support due to the shameful and undignified severing of relations with China in favour of Taiwan and the ill-advised and ill-considered interference n the works undertaken on the Castries Gros Islet highway by Guy Joseph, Communications and Works Minister resulting in additional inflation of the project cost all added to the pressure on the Government to find new sources of revenue.
The two opposition parliamentarians said that the Government’s promise to St. Lucians that they would eliminate financial mismanagement and waste of public funds thereby reducing Government’s annual recurrent expenditure by $300 million; reduce consumption tax on basic food items and commodities and to control inflation through effective policies of cost containment in production and consumption of goods and services have all come to nothing.