The COI has been the Territory’s Achilles heel ever since a departing governor reluctantly granted the wish of a former Premier who called for it day and night when he was Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. His rationale was that the NDP Party that formed the government of the day was the most corrupt in the history of BVI politics.
But words are spirit and life. Long after they are spoken, they still retain their capacity to haunt and to hurt.
The children of the sixties were lied to when they were told that;
“Sticks and stones can break your bones, but words can never hurt you.”
A pity that a former legislator did not subscribe to this maxim, when, according to prevailing press, she invoked the language of ruffians and marauders to repel the progenitor of that incessant propaganda that assaulted her ears once too often.
But the optics of the COI were wrong although the COI itself was necessary to curb the vigilante type behaviour of elected members who resort to frolics of their own, post-election, while pretending to be about the people’s business.
The COI felt like a judgment without the benefit of a jury of one’s peers that did not take the cultural history of BVI into account.
The conclusions neither shocked nor surprised. They felt foregone. They were expected. But they disappointed because one man’s word became the law of the land and the standard by which an entire Territory was judged.
Those words were careful to withhold judgment on British run institutions but locally run institutions were fair game.
The report of the lone Commissioner, as expected, was swallowed hook, line and sinker by an expectant Parliament and an Order in council was enacted to suspend the BVI Constitution should the actions agreed with the local government fall short.
That agreement was BVIs first real opportunity for engagement in the publicly perceived autocratic process that was the COI. For at that stage, his lordship had retired from the process and politics and diplomacy were free to enter the room.
Nevertheless, it was the actions of our leaders that got us the COI. But neither was an increasingly dependent public, blameless since begging had become a ‘copycat,’ national pastime.
But our leaders are wasting time, energy and money in their demands that the Order be lifted without regard to the fact that even if it were, it could be reinstated with minimal notice or effort as needed.
Our struggles would bear more fruit by ensuring full compliance with the conditions of the COI that we agreed to fulfill to allow the Territory to resume its interrupted crusade to self-determination.
The Premier described our exuberance to quickly fulfill the conditions of the COI as ambitious. But when one’s foot is caught in a snare, relief by any means is the goal.
But for the moment, we leave such matters behind and we turn our attention to the annual celebrations that mark the abolition from slavery in these Virgin Islands….
…. And to Fridays.
Happy Friday!