Basseterre, St. Kitts, April 29, 2020 — Operation Rescue founder Dwyer Astaphan, who helped fashion the three-party PLP/CCM/PAM coalition government, has accused Prime Minister Dr. the Hon. Timothy Harris of politicising COVID-19 pandemic briefings and has labelled the total shutdown of the country over the Labour Day weekend (7 p.m. Friday April 29 to 7 a.m. Tuesday May 5, 2020) as “an act of excessive muscularity.”
“The speech he made at the COVID-19 Briefing last Friday was not a COVID-19 speech, it was a political speech. Respectfully, out of place and unnecessary, unstatesmanlike, not at all prime ministerial — and sounded to me, Donald Trumpish,” Astaphan said on his weekly Facebook talk show “The Operation Room.”
He accused PM Harris of “talking politics and attacking personalities and going back to 2009” during COVID-19 briefings, “thus insulting the peoples’ intelligence.”
Astaphan said businessmen have complained of the late notices of lockdowns, which deprive them of making adequate arrangements for themselves and their employees. He labelled the Labour Day weekend total shutdown “an act of spite and an act of possible sadism — inflicting pain, suffering, or humiliation on others.”
“If in coming to the conclusion to lockdown the country for the entire Labour Day weekend, the idea of politics must have come into the consideration,” Astaphan concluded, noting that it is not hard to see that prime minister Harris is playing politics with the pandemic when government ministers wore masks in party colours and coalition candidates distributed care packages on lockdown days while opposition candidates were confined to their homes.