We have heard the story told, over the years, of the noble Queer Esther and the part she played in saving the lives of her people from the hubris of Haman.  

Her genius was in involving her people in the solution.

Our Representatives, the 13, have been busy.  They are almost daily in the people’s House passing legislation to comply with the prescriptive dictates of Sir Gary Hickinbottom’s COI report.

Their hard work, we hope, will contribute to the tapestry of good governance that we have been failing to weave in the public life of the Territory.  But we should rather be ashamed that we needed an external stimulus.

It will later surface, as a problem, that the wider input from the people is missing from the process. 

 There is no Queen Esther in the House. 

 Consequently, multiple amendments to the freshly baked legislation will be required.

It is a lost opportunity that the 13 have not stopped to summarize, for the people, what is being done on their behalf. 

Regardless of the rawness of the ill feelings we harbour over being treated like irresponsible children, if we are true to ourselves, we must agree that our stewardship was questionable.

And we must further agree that we brought this on ourselves.

BVI is at a critical point in its history.  But the 13 refuse to examine where we are; How we got here and be bold enough to chart a course, in policy, to ensure that this sordid part of our history never repeats itself.  

But perhaps we ask too much of them.  Maybe they are already acting within the full scope of their vision.

While Fahie was no H.L Stoutt, he had a vision which, unfortunately, was not aligned with the aspirations of the people; But he was a decision maker although some of those decisions costed us dearly.

It was Fahie who incessantly called for the COI against what he termed ‘the most corrupt government in the history of the BVI; And he spoke long and loud in the House trying to figure out where we were as a territory.

It was he who said, “we cannot move on from here if we do not understand where HERE is.”  He was, at the time, speaking of the state of the Treasury.

 Back then, before the green tide rose, he was a consistent hell raiser in the House of Assembly.  And subsequently, after the tide washed in,

He overstimulated the public with his incessant posts to social media showing off the work of his administration.  

He turned diplomacy on its head and conducted a brawl with the Minister for National Security in the public space.

Pride may have caused him to reject the loan guarantee and the Territory’s infrastructure is keeping the score.

He constituted some of the weakest Boards ever appointed in the BVI.  He was a self-confessed micromanager so those appointments give him something akin to absolute power.

But another micromanager upstaged him.  Ministers can no longer invite people to serve on Boards, they must apply; A retrograde step.

And then the hunter became the hunted.  And Fahie slipped off the jagged cliff of BVI public life.

 Now the height of conversation in the public space is whether the photograph of the District 1 Representative, who occupied a seat in the House for 23 years, should be removed from the walls of the People’s House.

We wonder if its removal can wipe away his years of service or wipe the records clean of his presence.

It cannot.

So, it stands to reason, certainly mine, that the photograph stays.

A lot may separate us on our Fridays;

A photograph should not.

Happy Friday!