OPINION: Why I Refuse to Remain Quiet

 BY- Yves R. Ephraim

Months following Antigua and Barbuda’s independence in 1981, as a fifth-former, my class was visited by government officials who were looking for young Antiguans and Barbudans willing to help in nation building.

We were told that our country needed us and that we should remain here to help build our new independent nation. 

Even then, there was massive brain-drain going on. 

I struggle to find a handful of my former classmates who still live in Antigua and Barbuda today.

The government officials offered my class guaranteed engineering scholarships if we wanted to work for APUA and Public Works.

At least three of my classmates applied and were successful. They were all given scholarships to pursue undergraduate studies in engineering and today are or were senior leaders in APUA and Public Works.

I must confess, that even as a teenager at the time, I was not interested in working for the public sector and therefore passed on this opportunity.

I had a deep love and fascination for Electronics, and was only interested in working for one of two local private sector firms that provided that training opportunity.

Even though I had no interest in working for the public sector, I was, however, committed to building my nation. I vowed to stay and help build this country as a patriot. Antigua and Barbuda was going to show the world that our sons and daughters rivalled the best minds in the world.

As the first born of a struggling single-mother parent, with a very absent father, I had very few options available to me, yet I vowed to stay and do my part to build my country. 

All through the years as I built my skills and competence, I have had more than a few opportunities to gain work and live abroad permanently. Some individuals even expressed to me that I was wasting my talent by staying in Antigua and Barbuda.

I love this country and despite the self-inflicted policy barriers this country puts on its sons and daughters, I chose to stay and push through the difficulties, feeling that it will all start to change some day in my lifetime. 

Today I am grateful to God for the opportunity to be making a meaningful contribution to this nation by providing job and mentoring opportunities for young people who themselves, are inspired to make an impact.

Antigua and Barbuda has always had issues these past 44 years since Independence and it will probably never cease to have problems. I am not expecting a utopia.

All that matters to me, is to be valued by my government, the same way my government wants me to be committed to national development. I think this is a fair exchange.

It was COVID, that forced me to openly voice my opinions. 

By that time, I had started to feel that my government did not value its people.

You can scroll back to 2020 in my Facebook content and verify this.

I was forced to speak out in response to the dystopian treatment of the people in this country. 

It was shocking to see how willing our leadership was to sacrifice this population through its forced mandate to accept an experimental drug. It threatened the jobs of public servants if they did not take the jab; denying their right to work. 

This act, to me, was a crime against humanity. 

One of my employees developed a permanent side-effect that will plague her for life after she voluntarily followed the “encouragement” of her government to take the jab.

For the sake of the tourism industry our government was willing to gamble with the lives of the vast majority of Antiguans and Barbudans to achieve an 80% vaccination rate with an experimental drug that turned out not to be a vaccine at all because it did not stop the transmission of the virus. 

It was the Ukrainian war that miraculously stopped the virus.

The government threw caution to the wind. 

In the aftermath of COVID, we are now seeing that the experimental drug did far more harm than good. For me, COVID, was a horrifying and dystopian experience: I feared more the government taking away all of my freedoms under the guise of safety, than being infected by the virus.

Since COVID, I have witnessed a litany of government policies that have been increasingly turning this nation into a neo-plantation and robbing Antiguans and Barbudans of their identify, their property and their ability to thrive safely in their homeland.

Let me list some of the most significant ones:

1. Degradation in our Telecom infrastructure with the confiscation of spectrum rights from Digicel and Flow. Including having the highest price per bandwidth in the region.

2. We lost access to the north eastern corridor of our country to a special economic zone where we gave up our sovereignty with no performance clause or economic spinoffs.

3. The marginalization of the Barbudans and the confiscation of their lands to enable the land giveaway to very wealthy investors;

4. The amendment of laws to make the confiscation of private property by the government far more easy.

5. Plunging Antigua and Barbuda into the international spotlight with the forced acquisition of the Alpha Nero, whose legal outcome represents a massive contingent liability for this country.

6. After guaranteeing that our water crisis would be solved in 14 days, it is almost 14 years and several hundreds of million dollars later, and we are just figuring out that it is the pipes we needed to change all along. A fact that was well-known from the start. 

7. There has been no other government administration in the history of this country that has been so avaricious with the official theft of private property. This appears to be the default policy.

8. We have lost visa access to the US both for travel and education. Prior to this we were told that this could never happen because we have one of the world’s most formidable ambassadorial negotiating teams. This matter has disrupted the lives of many Antiguans and Barbudans who for medical purposes are forced to languish.

9. Crime and violent crime are increasing with an under resourced police force. Losing all four tires from your car has now reached epidemic levels with no signs of abatement. It is an open secret which I recently encountered.

10. An under resourced justice system with recent judgements that are undermining public confidence.

11. Open Willingness to accept third country nationals (deportees) contrary to the national interest and with the potential to destabilize our country forever.

12. It was bad enough that Antiguans and Barbudans have long suffered from the knowledge that they were never preferred by their own government, but now it was made official with the intention to make Spanish an official language, within 30 days of winning the last election. This also included providing a special “desk” in the Prime Minister’s office specifically for the nationals of the Dominican Republic, seemingly excluding other Spanish-speaking residents from countries like Cuba and Venezuela.

13. We now want to widen the base of the Windfall Tax to include more local struggling businesses and to push up prices for struggling households. All this will nullify the recent increases in the minimum wage.

14. Providing amnesty to undocumented immigrants as one of the most important priorities of the government at this time.

15. Government has it eyes on the unclaimed bank deposits of $50M dollars. It is contemplating throwing away this $50m into another airline, after having no success with Antigua Airways. Even the deal with the new LIAT is questionable. You would think that we would use this to alleviate the woes at the hospital or to abandon expanding and extending the Windfall Tax. We can even use it to bolster the police force.

As a born citizen of Antigua and Barbuda, who is simply trying to make a meaningful contribution to this country, I am no longer feeling that my government is willing to provide an enabling environment that will guarantee my right to my private property; my right to my national identity; my right to a safe homeland; and the freedom to thrive without government interference.

This is why I am outspoken, and in the words of King Short Shirt, a fellow Point man: “nobody go run me from whey me come from!”

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