By: Vigilante
I am trying to figure out this government. The very day after they announced a double salary for civil servants, government auxiliary and STEP workers, they sent out a schedule of disconnection with dates as if it was a maintenance schedule. I have never seen such wickedness and lack of care in a government that pledged to put people first.
For nearly two years not a cruise ship, the mainstay of our economy, dropped anchor in our port. The ships have just begun to return so we are just beginning to catch ourselves. For nearly two years the bills piled up. The thousand dollars for three months barely put food on the table. SKELEC and the Water Department showed little mercy. Obviously that is a tall order for anybody — worse for all those who work in tourist-dependent businesses. Even if six cruise ships visited us for the entire month of December, people were so swallowed up by their indebtedness for the past twenty months that they would not be reasonably expected to be able to settle all arrears by the middle of December, the start of the scheduled disconnections.
Even though it’s a lot of money, not everybody wants to be in the peace programme. Most people were paying their bills before COVID-19 and even if they were not, the government should not be disconnecting or threatening to disconnect anybody’s electricity just before Christmas. Because these ministers no longer have to wonder how a bill will get paid, they have forgotten the tremendous pressure and stress that people face on a daily basis.
I was told and do believe that the government will be taking out all arrears from all who are getting the double next week. If that is so, it’s a sure way to get arrears settled, but it suggests to me that the government can’t really afford to pay any double. Frankly I don’t give a damn where and how he found the money. I have so many uses for this double. It is already spent and I haven’t seen it as yet. So I’ll have a drink out of the double while I try to understand what the Shawn Richards-led Public Works is doing with the KFC road expansion project at Bird Rock.