As daring as can be – the New Democratic Party

05.FEB.10

Editors: It is not important how hard we work. More important is the ease with which we work and get things done. Capital Kingstown exemplifies that. The little we get done for the effort we put in. It is precisely for this reason that there is always a plan. Unfortunately, with the best planned, it cannot be ruled-out that there are others who derive pleasure from watching others suffer.{{more}}

Kingstown, our nation’s capital, is in a nasty physical mess, and need not be so. Not only that, the physical condition of Kingstown lends itself to social decay. Take for instance the Milton Cato Memorial Hospital (MCMH). There had always been two means of getting to the hospital. Now there is only one. Rather than building an overpass, the NDP government poured concrete and killed out that option. We are now left with one narrow two-way street via Victoria Park in and out of Kingstown.

Capital Kingstown was considered to have become too small. The response was to reclaim almost the entire foreshore in Kingstown. That done, a plan which took many years to design was completed in 1973 and was made public and posted under the general post office in Kingstown for quite some time. The plan was to eliminate traffic and other congestions. A fourth road was designed to allow traffic from the windward side of the island to turn left after the south river bridge (Heritage Square) along the perimeter of the reclaimed land all the way down to Bottom Town. Not only that, the plan was also designed to accommodate a filling station at the entrance and also for car rentals. Incidentally, Bay Street was to become a two way street. Now enters the Mitchell-led NDP government in 1984. Early o’clock for whatever reasons, the port was extended to park more containers. That extension rendered the very entry road to the reclamation site obsolete, to say “vengeance is mine”. There must be a reason for constructing a building in Kingstown which touched both Bay and Back Street, to block off Middle Street. It is mind boggling.

For the benefit of the uninitiated, that building was not put there for the purpose which many Vincentian thought it was. Later for that.

The plan was designed to have a public square. That building cancelled that option. When mainlanders reflect on the NDP Government from 1984 to 2001, two things are common: disrespect for the efforts of those who preceded the NDP. Even worse than that is the NDP history of depriving the people of the mainland of the right to have a choice. The cost of fixing all of the aforementioned will double the national debt.

In the NDP Government, the majority were from the mainland (with the exclusion of Eddy Griffith). Are they not all culpable? You know, there is this ancient saying that “Had it not been for shamefacedness, they would not have had any”.

Stanley M. Quammie