Editorial

The much-anticipated national radio and television broadcast by Prime Minister Dr. Keith Mitchell turned out to be a major disappointment.

The speech offered no hope for the thousands of Grenadians who are crying out for salvation from their grave financial and economic plight. The Prime Minister spent the entire address repeating himself over and over about the release of three members of the Bernard Coard Gang of prisoners who have already been condemned to the dustbin of history.

The physical elimination of late marxist Prime Minister Maurice Bishop and his supporters in the bitter feuding for control of the 1979-83 Grenada Revolution has already assured the executioners of their place in world history. Nothing can change this historical fact.

It was rather unfortunate that Dr. Mitchell would spent all his time dealing with the release of three Gang members by a lawful court and not deal with the real burning issues facing the people of the Tri-island State of Grenada, Carriacou and Petite Martinique. The Prime Minister will have to really go and come again and deliver a real address to the people of this country who are waiting on "the leader" to give some hope at this point in time when their dollar can buy so little in the shops and supermarkets.

There was total silence on the impasse between government and the Public Workers Union (PWU) on a new wages contract for civil servants. There was nothing said on the current issue on the St. George's Port between employees of the Grenada Ports Authority and the Technical and Allied Workers Union.

Certainly, the PWU issue has serious financial implications for the country as government employees look for more money from an almost empty Treasury. The Prime Minister did nothing on Monday night to bring hope to the thousands of youth who left school in the past month and looking for jobs from a government that came into office in 1995 with the boast; "If is work yuh want, is work you go get".

GRENADA TODAY was expecting the Prime Minister to address the current lawsuits in the United States against both himself and Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Agriculture and Energy, Gregory Bowen. It is not Keith Mitchell of Happy Hill or Brooklyn who is on trial in a court in Brooklyn, New York but the Prime Minister of this Caribbean islands of an estimated 100, 000 people.

And Dr. Mitchell would have already known before he recorded the broadcast that Judge Gold in New York had set October 3 as the date for the commencement of proceedings in his court matter involving imprisoned international com-man and former Grenada Ambassador, Eric Resteiner.

That Monday night address by Dr. Mitchell has only served to reaffirm the belief of GRENADA TODAY that the current holder of the Office of Prime Minister has outlived his usefulness in  the job and it was time for him to move on. His ramblings were also not in sync with reality and truth and were laced with too many misrepresentations of historical facts.

The Prime Minister ought to know that the watershed in our history started on March 13, 1979 with the armed overthrow of the duly elected government of Sir Eric Matthew Gairy and not the bloodletting of October 19, 1983. Dr. Mitchell said: "The events of 1983 underscores forcefully the extent to which as a country we were denied the practice of good governance under the weight of which we are pledged in the finest tradition of Westminster style democracy to practice the principle of being willing as competing political interests to agreeing to disagree agreeably".

This is a clear misrepresentation of the truth. It was the overthrow of Sir Eric in a coup d'etat by the New Jewel Movement (NJM) of Maurice Bishop and Bernard Coard that deprived Grenadians of their right to vote in free and fair elections. Take the following statements made by the Prime Minister:

"This is why I can stand here confidently today and declare that under my watch never, never, and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one group by another.

We must buy into the noble idea that this country belongs to all of us and we must find ways to live together even though we may disagree on the specifics of the methodology for nation building. Disagreement over methodology aside however, the one thing we must agree on as a nation is not to have 1983 repeat itself".

Dr. Mitchell was seen by viewers sitting and not standing as he delivered the address. But surely, those words quoted above could not have been written by the Prime Minister himself.

His New National Party (NNP) government is the only one since the return of democratic rule in 1983 through the actions of late President Ronald Reagan, Tom Adams of Barbados and Eugenia Charles of Dominica that is engaged in the personal crucifixion of so many Grenadians.

The likes of Nolan Murray, Richard Duncan, Cecil Greenidge, Basil Harford, Madonna Harford, Meryl Forsyth and several others who have felt the full weight of the NNP similar to those so-called counter-revolutionaries of the 1979-83 Grenada Revolution.

And Dr. Mitchell has spent the better part of the last 12 years in office plotting the downfall of those perceived to be opponents of his regime.

But as he embarked upon that course of action to bury his so-called enemies and leave them for dead, he forgot to also dig a pit for himself, as the old people would say when you dig a pit for a man, also dig one for yourself.