MIA > Archive > Tim Hector
Fan the Flame, Outlet, 17 January 1997.
Online here https://web.archive.org/web/20120416011318/http://www.candw.ag/~jardinea/fanflame.htm.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
The single most prominent feature about Prime Minister Lester Bird is that he has an enormous capacity for self-deception.
On Tuesday this week I listened to Parliament and heard Lester Bird deceiving himself that he was the first Antiguan to represent Antigua in a variety of sports. The cat actually believed his own fib.
I will not raise Pat Nanton. That was before my time. I will simply say that the late Hubert Anthonyson represented Antigua in Cricket, in football, in volleyball, in Athletics and aquatics. Anthonyson seemed capable of everything. He is also a good table tennis player. A very fine person as well.
Even more contemporaneously, Derek Michael represented Antigua at Cricket, at football, at tennis, performing in all three at the highest level. He is a man of sterling character who would not play false and would not falsely win.
Lester Bird was holding forth to Parliament that representing Antigua a couple of times at football, Antigua for two years in cricket, and in Athletics made him some national super-hero and a very firm belonger, despite his American birth.
But the point is, he deceived himself into believing that like Derek Michael or the late Hubert Anthonyson he represented Antigua in sports for many a year. It is not so. And far from so. Lester Bird left Antigua at the beginning of his sporting career, never to return. And since his return, and despite the fact he has reached the apogee of power he has done next-to-nothing to raise the level of Athletics here, in which he excelled. In many ways he kicked down the ladder by which he did not ascend.
But Lester Bird must deceive himself that he was this outstanding sportsman recognised as such in Antigua. The truth is that Lester never belonged.
At the AGS where he went to school he was out of sorts. His father had challenged the Planters in the 50’s when he was at school here, and most of his contemporaries and their families were in a state of “betweenity” fearful of planter and so unwilling to support their own oppressed working people. He left Antigua shortly after leaving school. He felt cheated out of being Head Boy at the AGS and it increased his unease and discomfort with Antigua. He was glad to leave.
On returning he lived under the shadow of his Ole Man, and that irked and irritated him no end. The point is he was never at ease with Antigua and Antiguans. He always felt like an outsider. He his happiest in expatriate company, or that of local rascals.
For instance he has never felt comfortable with his Cabinet members. To him they are all dodo’s. Robin Yearwood inclusive. He cannot suffer a single member of his Cabinet. At best he tolerates them only as a means of maintaining power.
The other feature about Lester Bird is that he forms no enduring relationships – with anyone. Everyone is expendable. He could abandon Hugh Marshall, with whom everyone thought he was twinned, without batting an eye.
He and Hugh Marshall, had resigned together from the V.C. Bird government. Lester had nothing to do when out of power. He was completely out of sorts. He was after all an expatriate in his own country. He had no linkages, which bound him to landscape or seascape.
The point is power is the be all and end all of his existence here. He has had no other relation to the country, except political power. Without it he is like a featherless bird without a head. There is nothing that Lester Bird wants to do in Antigua except be in power. He does not have a vision in sports to realise. He has no business which he would want to develop. He has no facet of the law in which he has kept an enduring interest. Without power he is a fish out of water. Power is the reason for his existence, his raison d’être, as he would say.
But his abandonment of Hugh Marshall is most instructive. They resigned together, Marshall and Hendy Simon standing in solidarity with him. He crawled back into the government through a back-door, and left his colleagues out in the cold. Power, he had to have it. Principles notwithstanding. Those went on the back-burner. And have remained there ever since. He abandons friend and principle at the drop of a hat.
What is more Lester Bird could crawl back in his father’s government, which he had fulsomely denounced in speech and print, and do so without even a cosmetic change that met the demands about which he resigned. He is shameless.
What is even worse, is that he did go back into the government from which he resigned with Marshall, Simon and St Luce and then occupied the very Ministry and office that his friend and colleague Hugh Marshall had previously occupied. Lester did not feel a thing about this. He was absolutely convinced that Antigua and Antiguans did not give a hoot about such “niceties”. To him the country was amoral, and to function in it at the highest level one had to be amoral. This apparently is his credo.
So he jettisoned Marshall, who had carried the can for him for years, left him, out in the cold, took his very Ministry and office, and when Marshall lost his seat he could humiliate further by placing him behind new-comers like Kenrick Isaac in the Senate. Lester Bird has no regard for the value of anyone. He abandons people, however close, like a banana peel.
Let me put this on another level. In his New Year address PM Lester Bird said “But I could not end without mentioning bonds. They have always been something of an adventure.”
In other words, the roads were always bad. Bad under V.C. Bad under PLM which he himself labelled – “The Road government”. Bad in colonial times. The roads were always an adventure. If they were always an adventure under Lester Bird they are a misadventure, to be sure.
The point is Lester Bird can never hold himself responsible for anything. He cannot, could not and would not allow himself to accept, that under him the roads have deteriorated to a condition far worse than any other previous administration. Lester Bird accepts nothing. The truth is he does not belong and cannot bring himself to say this is not good enough. I have failed in this respect. To acknowledge failure, is at least to accept that there was some standard, some mark, at which you were aiming and somehow did not arrive there, to the disappointment of yourself and others.
This posits the existence of some community of beliefs and colleagues before whom one feels responsible. Lester Bird shares no belief with anyone and he has no respect for his colleagues. He belongs to no class, save the expatriate class, and his schemes work best with them. Despite all his protestations to the contrary, the man is expatriate through and through.
It is common knowledge or ought to be that Lester Bird can say “yes” to opposite sides of the same argument. Let an example suffice. When he was President of the Antigua Cricket Association he voted to bring Derek Robins’ XI even after Derek Robins had toured South Africa, defying the sports ban.
When I turned up at the General meeting of the Cricket Association and made the case against Derek Robins XI coming here after he had defied the apartheid ban, Lester changed sides. He behaved as if he was always against. He can speak on opposite sides of the same argument because he has no conviction about anything. He has words but no thoughts. Therefore he is on all sides all at the same time.
Later the same man that was willing to welcome Derek Robins after he had toured apartheid South Africa, postured as Deputy Prime Minister that he could not abide a single player coming here who had played in South. Sincerity is utterly alien to Lester Bird. To be sincere, means that one is committed to a body of ideas or beliefs and work for their realisation. What is anathema to those beliefs or ideas immediately provokes a response. Lester Bird has no such characteristic as part of his make-up. He despises the middle class, and thinks nothing of the working class, except to buy their votes.
The key fact about Lester Bird is that he glories in flattery. He loves to be flattered only less than he loves to flatter himself. Let an example suffice. Listen to Lester Bird praising himself totally oblivious of the elementary fact, that self-praise is no kind of praise. Said he in his recently released, glossy publication, off which somebody made a large sum of money at the expense of the people of Antigua and Barbuda. Here is Lester: “To have accomplished what we have in normal circumstances would have been praiseworthy; to have done so despite the devastation of these storms is truly remarkable.” Suppose he saw St Martin, almost levelled by Luis, and now there is hardly a trace of that disaster. Lester praises himself and claims wonders in spite of the miseries the population must endure.
Now this is a situation in which the government cannot meet the demands to maintain roads, so they deteriorate beyond recognition. It is a situation in which the Lester Bird government after enjoying a monopoly over the supply of electricity could not meet the demand for electricity. Mis-management had produced this disaster. Yet Lester Bird tried to make disaster into paradise, we never had it so good as we have had it with his “truly remarkable performance” as head of government.
The Lester Bird government could not meet its recurrent expenditure for education. It had to impose a levy to meet recurrent expenditure in education.
Lester Bird cannot accept the elementary economic proposition that over-employment in the public sector, leads to underdevelopment in all sectors. He defies logic to suit himself. Always himself, in all ways. Lester Bird cannot accept what his own experts from the East Caribbean Central Bank told him that “The use of funds from the Social Security Fund and Medical Benefits scheme to meet recurrent expenditure and service debts has threatened the financial viability of both institutions.”
Providing these Social Security Funds and Medical Benefits funds are going to finance some scheme by Asot or an expatriate firm, for example, Empire Capital Corporation, Lester Bird will persist with his frequent raids on both Social Security and Medical Benefits to the detriment of both institutions. He could not care less.
Lester Bird will not accept that it is his white elephants in the main, Heritage Quay, Royal Antiguan, the multi-million Royal Antiguan road, which has plunged Antigua into debt payments so burdensome, that all capital formation by the government becomes impossible. In other words, Lester Bird has hamstrung Antigua and Barbuda.
I have attempted to show here how Lester Bird has mismanaged everything, from roads, through schools, to the finances of the country. No matter how cogent the evidence Lester Bird will always tell you that such evidence is neither “compelling nor irresistible”. The man is entirely without principles or conscience.
Lester Bird is a particular social type. Rootless and un-rooted in his own society. He owes allegiance to nothing and no one. His father before him had a clear sense of historical mission, however limited, namely, to break the strangle-hold of the plantation on Antiguan life. Lester Bird has no such mission however limited. Save and except allowing himself and his ministers to use the State as a means of private accumulation. Accumulation for its own sake. They never invest a cent in their own country. Any investment they have is a consequence of a deal with a foreigner, in which they provided the power of office, but not a cent of their own vast resources of money. In another profession such are called “pimps”.
Lester Bird is a particular social type, I repeat. Lester Bird is supposed to have a degree in history – American history. In spite of all that, he has not read a single thing about the history of the Caribbean, far less the history of Antigua. He therefore does not know the country he leads, either historically or by experience. He has never had any relation to or with production here. Nor does he wish one. Likewise nor does he wish to know in historical terms. Caribbean history is not history for Lester Bird. American and European history is all that history is supposed to be.
Lester could align himself with Space Research to send arms to racist South Africa in 1977–78 and feel absolutely no sense of remorse. The important thing is that he got away with it. There then is the essence of his political being. He will do anything, tell any falsehood, undermine everything, overblow anything. He has no viable ends in mind. Therefore all his means are ends in themselves. He loves power. Without it he is reduced to what he really is – nothing in particular. With power though he will play the game of being all things to all men, and nothing in particular to anybody. Therefore under Lester Bird locals will be elected, but expatriates will rule. He is devoid of any West Indian consciousness. He is a First World consciousness. Therefore some expatriates love him and he loves them. Therefore under Lester Bird locals will be elected, but expatriates will be firmly in control. He cannot act otherwise. It is his political nature. Miscreant yes, but political nature nonetheless.
Socrates the great Greek philosopher once said: “The un-examined life is not worth living.” Lester Bird has never examined his life and its non-national purposes. He buries reflection by playing the playboy of the western world.
Last updated on 14 February 2022