By Tyrone Hodge

“Where there is no vision, the people will perish; but he that keepeth the law happy is he.” ~ Proverbs 29:18

Just when you think you’ve seen it all, a new catastrophe is added to the already burgeoning list of maladies that we’re afflicted with. The latest malady is the revelation that some of the employees of the two indigenous banks were terminated on Friday, August 26, some four months after being hired, thus adding to the already rather large population of Anguilla’s unemployed.

It seems that no one is at the helm of this once prosperous ship, for given what has transpired one would have to come to the conclusion that all are asleep on the bridge. And not only are they asleep on the bridge, no one has any kind of a clue what the final destination is supposed to be. People will inevitably perish where there is no vision and I’m afraid that those tasked with steering us out of treacherous waters have lost their compass.

Anguilla, once considered a jewel in the crown, in all fairness, cannot be called that anymore. The sheen has worn off of our tranquility. Who’s to blame you ask? Well, when we were the cat’s meow to use a worn out cliché, we were all more than happy to claim our Anguillan heritage, but now since we are experiencing a few bumps in the road, we are no longer that anxious to boast of our heritage. We are Anguillans through good times and bad. If we can’t accept that, then we have done a great disservice to those who came before us.

As was so eloquently pointed out by Justice Mitchell on the Mayor Show a few Saturdays back, we lack the foresight to think and plan ahead. We wait until something happens to react to it, rather than having the intuition to see it coming. We are some of the most erudite people on the face of the earth, yet we are continually flummoxed by just about everyone, from the British to the Central Bank. The OECS and whoever else is out there.

Slavery was abolished for us in the Caribbean in 1830, but we are still saddled with the effects of it. Though we no longer are the producers of corn, wine, coffee, tobacco, sugar and rum, we still find ourselves deprived of the comfort and luxuries of the civilized world.

We act as though we are still in shackles in the filthy hold of the slave ships crossing the Middle Passage, unable to lie down, suffering from the bad food, the stench of human feces, death and the whip of the slave masters, the indignities of being treated as chattel, and finally, the betrayal by our own for money. Every August we celebrate Emancipation but, seriously, are we free? What were we emancipated from? When you see what our own government is doing to us, can one truly say that we are a free people?

No matter what we do or how hard we try, we can’t seem to shake the stigma of slavery. We seem to have adopted that learned helplessness about ourselves. Rather than getting up off our haunches and fighting back, we seem to have accepted our plight as a fait accompli, a done deal.

When one hears the stories that are as varied as the people telling them, one is forced to stop and take stock. That a people who had everything going for them now facing the systematic destruction of a way of life is truly unbelievable. The once very proud people who were the envy of our Caribbean brothers and sisters, now having to kowtow to the likes of a Central Bank located in of all places St Kitts, a place where a lot of our misery originated, is somehow very hard to swallow.

“A people without the knowledge of their history and culture is like a tree without roots.”

That phrase by Marcus Garvey many years ago, pretty much sums up our situation. We act and behave as though we are 21st century people, when in fact we are 19th century folks who bypassed the 20th and leapfrogged into the 21st.

Gone are all the things that made us great. Taking their place is a host of things, all of which tend to work against us. Things like unfathomable laws enacted by our own House without fully understanding the breadth and width of them, things like our government being more interested in dispensing political favours to ardent supporters and so on. Everyone you talk seems to think that “Anguilla Gone.”

Anguilla is probably the last bastion where a people can determine their own destiny. We do not need the apron strings of a Central Bank in St Kitts or the British government to determine where we go, and the fact that we have allowed the Victor Banks government under the guise of international banking standards to hoodwink us, is inconceivable. We have simply missed the big picture here. What is really behind all that is happening to our lovely island?

Anyone with half a brain can see that this is the systematic destruction of a people. How do you accomplish that? Well, you start by sabotaging their infrastructure. You basically ignore what few checks and balances they are and you simply do whatever you want. You hold yourself accountable to no one and therefore you have free rein.

Next you sabotage the economy by simply not trying to grow it. You kill what few jobs they are and by so doing you insure that people can’t pay their bills which in turn make them delinquent in their obligations. In addition to that, you fail to get the Central Bank to do their job which as their mission statement implied, was to facilitate the balanced growth and development of member states. What have they done for us in Anguilla?

Right now Anguilla is under siege. Major banking institutions are talking about de-risking us, and given the incompetent manner in which all involved have handled our banking situation, one cannot blame them. Our esteemed governor, Ms Scott, once said that what the government put forward would cost future generations of Anguillans into perpetuity. When asked why she signed off on their proposal, she said they satisfied her concerns.

The government-owned bridge bank is failing faster than a speeding bullet and Victor had the audacity to borrow US$22 million (EC$59 million) from the World Bank, basically throwing good money after bad.

We are at the mercy of just about everyone, from our own incompetent government, the World Bank the OECS, the IMF, the Central Bank, the ECCU and last but not least, the British government.

To our Caribbean brothers and sisters, I bear no ill will to any of you, but understand this, your leaders are counting on cashing in on the blood sweat and tears of the long departed people like my father Walter Hodge, Atlin Harrigan, Collins Hodge, John Webster, Elliot Webster, Wallace Rey, and Jeremiah Gumbs — Ronald Webster and Bob Rogers and quite a few others, and I want your leaders to know that it will be a cold day in hell before they are able to replenish their empty treasuries on the backs of hard working Anguillans.

It is said that a man’s home is his castle and he will defend it to the death. Let me break it down for you. When Anguillans could not get a loan from any bank, they did what any smart enterprising Anguillan would do. They saw a need for a bank and a few entrepreneurial young men led by Kennedy Hodge and Marcel Fahie, which also included Timothy Hodge, Walton Fleming, Don Mitchell, Ralph Hodge, Cecil Niles and a host of others, set in motion what would eventually become the National Bank of Anguilla.

It is well documented why the bank ran into problems, but for the sake of this argument, I am going to fast forward to the present. The election promise by Victor Banks and his cohorts to save the indigenous banks as part of their manifesto never happened. What did happen was a reversal of that promise. Our shares, all 4,000 of us, were obliterated, the offshore banks were closed down, a so-called bridge bank masquerading under the name of NBCA, owned and operated by the government of Anguilla, surfaced out of all this self inflicted carnage.

And no one, I repeat, no one has been held accountable, not the Central Bank, or the two previous Anguilla governments under which this debacle was allowed to happen, all the while the British government sits on its hands and whose only concern is that we don’t do anything to embarrass them. Where do we seek redress?

Anguilla has grown from an island that no one wanted or even cared about, with a population of about 6,500 people, to a whopping 15,000, give or take, and without much help from anyone. We have always had to fend for ourselves. We had to make do with what we had, and as the saying goes: “Necessity is the mother of invention,” we had to invent when it was necessary. Out of hard times, we forged an identity etched in stone.

We did what we had to do and we will not stand by and let Victor or anyone for that matter, relinquish our birthrights to anyone.

So to those ministers of finance of the ECCU, who are sharpening their knives to carve up Anguilla and its resources, think again and let me leave you with the words of our first chief minister, the Honourable James Ronald Webster, the father of our nation, though gravely ill he may be: “Stay out of Anguilla’s affairs to which you’ve contributed nothing.”

We have problems, some of omission and most by commission. We are constantly being derided by our chief minister and the silence of his cabinet makes them complicit in this destruction of our homeland. A people can only tolerate so much for so long. After that all bets are off. Just when you thought that nothing else could happen to us, something else pops up. No Hollywood screenwriter could conjure up this storyline. One would have to suspend disbelief to buy this.

There isn’t all that much wrong with Anguilla that a vibrant economy couldn’t cure. We have bought a pig in a poke and, as the old folks will tell you, never ever do that.

It’s the fourth quarter and our backs are against the wall. Do we punt, or do we make a last stand? Anything short of an all out blitz will come up woefully short. It’s time to clean house, leaving not one vestige of the past. Where there is no vision a people will inevitably perish. The Turks say: “It is not just the fault of the axe, but the tree as well.”

Remember, Dr Eric Williams admonished his people to be actively engaged. He said something to the effect that an alert, active and attentive citizenry keeps governments honest. Former Bahamian Cabinet minister Laing said: “Sleeping voters and a passive media are an ill-intentioned politician’s dream.”

It’s time we wake both these guys and ourselves from our Methuselah-like malaise. So until next time, may God bless us all and may He continue to bless Anguilla.

Tyrone Hodge is an Anguillan currently living in California and an educator, who values education and one’s heritage. He has written extensively for the Anguillan newspaper and is a panelist of the Mayor Show, which originates in Anguilla every Saturday, in which we focus on identifying problems and offering solutions. His father was Walter G. Hodge, one of the original stalwarts of the Anguilla revolution of 1967

For more on this story go to: http://www.caribbeannewsnow.com/topstory-Commentary%3A-Anguilla-under-siege-31990.html