During the recent press conference, you accused the Dutch Government of applying practices that are typical of the behavior of the West India Company during the colonial period. Indeed, a great deal of commotion has arisen on our islands due to the hurricane behavior of the Dutch government in enforcing reform measures as a condition for financial and economic support.
Everyone can have an opinion, one will believe that the Netherlands has crossed the line, the other will judge that the Netherlands has not gone far enough and should have taken over again long ago.
You yourself drew a comparison with the behavior of the WIC, with which you apparently once again, for the umpteenth time, have tapped out of the colonial keg, a by now cleverly truncated tactic that you apply every time when you are at odds with the motherland.
What you do not realize is that this apparently brutal attitude of Dutch politicians is largely due to their boundless annoyance at the kind of wrong politicians which you are a textbook example of, the kind that plush only aspires to take advantage of and use the obtained state power for their own gain or to favor companions.
Your reign is brimming with scandals, all of which involve scheming shady business models for you and/or your closed ones. I can vividly imagine that the Netherlands has had enough by now and therefore wants to do everything to structurally change that.
Far more reprehensible than the colonizer are the colonizers who take over the colonizer’s misconduct and use their acquired state power for the same opportunism they accuse the colonizer of. You are the archetype of the local politician who once came to power, exhibits the same greedy behavior as the ex-colonizer, a phenomenon so aptly described by writer/psychiatrist/philosopher/freedom fighter/revolutionary Frantz Fanon in his famous oeuvre “The outcasts of the earth”.
You take the place of the WIC, you take over its role because you try to derive the maximum personal advantage from your position of power because you think you have the right to do so. Curaçao, just like the WIC at the time, is also just a playing field for your personal interests. You imagine yourself to be the savior of the people, a delusion that is absolutely incompatible with all those practices that bear your signature, a signature characterized by pushing others forward to conceal your involvement in matters that you know cannot see the daylight.
Our friendly national character, combined with your talented flux de bouche, means that all your deviant behavior is tolerated, to the great frustration of Dutch politicians who have to watch that and are unable to deal with the improper handling of autonomous administrative structures from their Dutch seats to stop politicians like you.
No wonder then that feelings of powerlessness turn into overreactions. Regardless of the outcome of the mission that the Prime Ministers from Aruba and Curaçao have undertaken to the Netherlands, our island will have no solution as long as WIC-like administrators like you are not replaced by sincere and knowledgeable ministers who have people’s interests in mind.
The call for a business cabinet is getting louder and more rightly, because your narrow-minded attitude shows that no improvement can be expected to upscale the administrative thinking of this government.
George Lichtveld
Curaçao
