Please permit me to respond to an article published in The Grenadian Voice online newspaper dated December 04, 2020 entitled ‘Former Politician rules out two names for NDC Leader’. The article quoted Mr Phinsley St Louis as a longstanding NDC member singling out two names that he would not support for the leadership of the party. The article made several direct quotations from Mr St Louis signalling the former executive member of the NDC entertained an interview with your paper and maybe other entities without first contacting the current executive of the Party to find out what is the situation within the organization.
Such public pronouncements without direct interaction with the Party is in poor taste, even disturbing for someone who claims to be one of the founding fathers of the party and whose experience should have taught him that the NDC was never built around a single individual or a ‘maximum leader’. It is strange that whilst many of the founding members of the NDC find the time to offer support and inspiration to the people who currently run the organization, Mr St Louis for many years has never lifted a finger to help or support the party, but always find it necessary to criticize every person who is elevated to the position of Party Leader.
Mr St Louis boasts in the article that he was able to defeat the weakened Sir Eric Matthew Gairy on his return to Grenada. Come on Mr St Louis; the GULP at the time could not even form a proper slate of candidates to contest an election, you should know that you would have been no match for the Father of Grenada’s Independence during his fruitful years, so really there is nothing to boast about. Mr St Louis you should also know that it must have been your style of disloyalty and lack of confidentiality which caused the late H A Blaize not to trust you enough to offer you a position in his cabinet, apart from that, you were a threat to no one.
If you took some quiet time to think things through, I am certain that you would have figured it out; but your ego just would not permit you to do that. Instead, there you are, still on the side-lines of politics after all these years trying to direct the game of politics in Grenada not for the greater good but to the detriment of most Grenadians. It appears that your intention is to muddy the waters for the NDC which you claim to be a founding father of.
Having identified that ‘Keith Mitchell knows how to play people’ then now is not the time to make shallow and baseless claims on competent and qualified Grenadians who, despite the prevailing financial and psychological dominance of one party, the known irregularities of the 2018 elections as reported on by the OAS and the deterioration in the fabric of society, are willing to put themselves forward to rescue a country which you claim is in a mess. The major claim by St Louis against the two persons is that “they are not people’s persons”. The same negative propaganda put out by Mitchell and his surrogates to maintain their stranglehold on this country.
What is this people person thing? Can the treatment meted out to so many public officers, teachers, farmers, some members of the same NNP and other ordinary folks in this country from 1995 to now be considered as ‘people person’? Mr St Louis should know that if one wants to referee a match, he/she must get in the game. It just cannot be done competently enough on the side-lines.
As a young person reading your article, I conclude that Mr St Louis has never been a team player, which is sad. A good team player would join the long list of persons who are currently holding up the NDC and pointing its leadership in the right direction. To answer his question about leadership in the party, his shallow comments on Mr Burke and Ms Joseph do not disqualify any of them from becoming the Political Leader of the party now or in the future, but instead they expose him as a selfish man of shallow thoughts who thinks that no one is good enough to lead the party which he claims hatched on his balcony.
A concerned Grenadian
