NA wants public meeting
on Laveist-Boasman affair
~ Either Louie or Sarah is lying, says Marlin ~
PHILIPSBURG--The National Alliance (NA) will submit a request Monday morning for a public debate in the Island Council on the request for the removal of Raphael Boasman as head of the Labour Department based on a deal apparently made by members of the Executive Council.
“The question is: was there a deal made during either an Executive Council meeting or a private Democratic Party (DP) meeting in a restaurant or a bar, and what would have been the reason for the removal of the head?” NA leader William Marlin said during a press briefing on Sunday.
NA will be putting forward a number of questions on which the party wants answers and clarity.
Referring to statements made by Labour Commissioner Louie Laveist, Marlin said he had never seen it go so “low” in terms of the credibility of government.
“That a Commissioner has come out and blatantly has told the public that ‘we had a deal to remove Boasman in exchange for my support to reappoint Commissioner Maria Buncamper-Molanus’ tells us two things: under normal circumstances he would not have supported the re-appointment of Buncamper-Molanus, but he would only go along if the Executive Council would go along in removing the head of the Labour Department with whom he had a problem.”
Marlin said he also had listened to DP leader Sarah Wescot-Williams on the radio on Sunday saying emphatically that there was no deal. “That leads us to conclude that somebody is lying,” Marlin said.
When Laveist did not sign in for the Island Council meeting on the budget amendments two weeks ago, NA had already indicated that it was because of the ongoing problem between him and the rest of the Executive Council. The party had also understood that the problem stemmed from the head of the Labour Department not taking care of personal business of the Commissioner.
“The Commissioner supposedly submitted directly or via a company a request for certain people to work in barbershops and hair salons. Apparently the advice from the Labour Department was negative. This infuriated the Commissioner and the head has to go, Marlin said.”
However, once a person becomes a civil servant there are procedures in the law that protect him or her, he said. “No politician, Commissioner or [political] party has the right to remove a civil servant because they have a problem with the civil servant.”
He said it was no longer tolerable to tell the people that government is busy introducing a trajectory of good governance for more transparency and apparently it applies only to the public and civil servants, but not to members of the DP Executive Council.
He also criticised that government has continuously been under threat based on the slim majority of six seats in the Island Council on which it relies. “If anyone withdraws support from the government there is no government. You constantly hear that Commissioners take care of themselves, making sure that families, friends and spouses are appointed in supervisory boards of directors, receive government land, bus and taxi permits while others are waiting.”
Marlin referred once more to what his party has been saying for the last years: “A house divided cannot rule.”
The infighting of the DP, Marlin believed, is to the detriment of the development and people of St. Maarten. “The Government does not seem to understand that and now the infighting is becoming the norm of the day. We constantly hear of the problems of the party, but now the infighting is beginning to affect the governing of the country.”
Instead of dealing with the problems, Marlin said, Wescot-Williams sounded on Sunday as though she was trying to blame everybody else, saying basically that there were so many more important things to tackle, such as the international financial crisis, than what was happening in the DP, but that the latter was what people seemed to be concerned about.
It’s not about what people are concerned about, Marlin said, but about government not governing, while the problems keep pilling up. He listed several “problems” of the past year with which he believed government had not dealt correctly.
In this regard he mentioned the re-appointment of Buncamper-Molanus caught in a conflict of interest over The Sky is the Limit Foundation and TelEm, problems affecting teachers taking government to court, people of University of St. Martin referring to letters written to government which the Commissioner of Education did not address and problems with the St. Maarten Carnival Development Foundation.
He also referred to problems in GEBE and the seesaw battle between management and board about reduction of the fuel clause rate, the reportedly more than 80 cases of dengue and people who have died, and the Government Building that every day is costing the tax payers more money.
