Dear Editor,
One of my people who usually picks my brain asked me recently what were the acronyms for “nothing going on”. Because I know who I was dealing with, I assumed that it was a loaded question, so I told him to turn off his phone, you will not play it back and say that I say. The part of the conclusion of the discussion turned out to be that those are the people who constantly stagnate the business of the country. A common expression has become “the bottom of the pile” or “in the drawer which is hardly opened”.
At five years old I was a batboy for the Baby Ruth baseball team in Aruba and at that time already my father insisted that if I am going to be involved in anything I should know the basics of it. At a very young age I used to sell the local newspaper and when I was 13 years old the Windward Island Opinion came from St. Maarten to my father’s friend so I also distributed and sold that on Aruba. Again my father would query me on articles in that newspaper. “If you are selling those papers you should be able to know some of the headlines in the paper.” Later on I joined the Baseball Umpires Association of St. Maarten and I used to challenge the players to know the baseball rules better that me.
It is from that premise I rate my Ministers. One of the things that I realized when I was a baseball umpire is that the baseballs that were used in the Major Leagues and many other countries where baseball is played were made in Haiti. That opened my mind and I concluded that if Haiti, a country in the Caribbean, can make something as important to the sport as baseballs, then other things can be made also. I went back to when we were looking forward to get yams from Statia. When they told me that lobster was used here for bait for fish pots my reaction was “and they don’t export them?”
Why am I writing all of this? Because of the number plate saga. I do not know where Mister Irion was in 2013, I am sure if there was goodwill to serve the people of St. Maarten in the right way, someone should have told him that the results will be just like in 2013. Mr. Tuitt is still alive and there are a lot of NGOs around who if there was goodwill should not have permitted the sale of number plates to go that way.
And it should not even be necessary for me to write this letter because several times last year I commented on the blunder that the Receiver and the Finance as well as the Justice Ministers made by giving in to the demands of those who were against not putting “The Friendly Island” while putting “50 years of Carnival” on the 2019 plates. They had a whole year to do the thing right, but I believe that “what’s in it for me” again is looming its head. and then to my disgust I have to read that there is a sharp drop in road tax compared to the same period last year.
Well, let me add this: just like they used statistics from since 2011 to determine the crime rate I believe they should use the figures from 2018 as a comparison to 2019 and 2020.
Why am I referring to be well versed in the material? As long as I can remember, where to make the number plates has been a point of discussion in the so many governments of St. Maarten, I am sure we also know that Haiti is a possibility, did we really have to go all the way to the Middle East? Now we still do not have any number plates and we have to rely on the cooperation from the insurance companies and the keurings lokaal to help curb the illegal use of motor vehicles on our public roads.
What the majority of the drivers would say is that the police strike for money so they don’t think the police paid their road tax neither. That is why they do not expect any controls.
I believe that it is time enough for us to know what is out there on the market, where to get it and what are the pros and cons when we purchase goods abroad. Are we still not aware that we have to be careful in dealing with finances of the people?
History has proven that it comes back to haunt you.
Russell A. Simmons
