By: Spokesman Newsroom
BASSETERRE, St. Kitts (Monday 22nd August 2022) — “I accept the results of the elections but if I had to do what I did again, I would absolutely do it again because I know I did the right thing and if it means I had to take one for the team — the team meaning the people of St. Kitts and Nevis — to get rid of what I thought was a prime minister that was not acting in the best interest of the people, then I did the right thing regardless of what the election results were after that,” said Chairman of the People’s Action Movement (PAM) and immediate past government minister Jonel Powell during an appearance on WINNFM’s ‘Island Tea’ on Friday 19th August 2022. Powell was defeated in Constituency Two by newcomer Marsha Henderson of the SKNLP.
Speaking about what his party did, he said a team came together and did a post-mortem concerning the elections: “We assessed all the different options that were before us. We knew what the potential consequences were but we felt at that point in time it was what we needed to do and when. Sometimes you just have to make a decision, and we chose to do that. We knew that there was a strong possibility of our votes being split but to be honest, because of the way in which Team Unity sort of disintegrated, there was nothing more or nothing else that we could have done to change the outcome.” On mistakes: “Generally speaking, there was the issue of perhaps the explanation of why we did what we did and when we did it. In hindsight and based on discussions and feedback from persons, perhaps we could have handled that differently.” On the party’s future: “As a party, we will rebuild and move on as we have done before. It is not the first time PAM has lost; we’ve come back and gone into government twice already and so it is what it is.”