Friday 4 July 2014

THE PROBLEM WITH MAKING MILLIONS ON YACHTING


 
THE ROT AND DECAY OF ST LUCIA’S MARINA COMPLEX

Ganter’s Bay is a ghetto marina where the Hackshaws squat like white bourgeois Conway residents.
(No lie. All the money the Hackshaws make at Ganter's, they never pay rent. And SLASPA lets them squat for free.)

Vieux Fort’s brilliant land reclamation project to turn the south-west bay into a marina complex, a town within a town, remains a well-detailed dream in the top secret plan for quadrant development that every government refuses to implement. In fact, instead of doing what's good for Vieux Fort, Kenny is currently planning to throw Ausbert d'Auvergne's quadrant development plan away.

Soufriere was on its way with the award-winning Soufriere Marine Management Area. But somehow, it lost its way and is now another government agency instead of a local economic development driver.

As for Rodney Bay Marina, ever since IGY took over, the place has deteriorated into a racist, ill-planned, plantation era complex. The moorings were placed so far from the supermarket and restaurant that it is easier to leave their boats by dinghy than it is to walk to the supermarket and buy ice cream or beer on a whim. The toilets near the supermarket are shut down. They have been turned into storage, to EVERYONE’S great inconvenience. The Rastas and Seventh Day Adventists have almost all been terminated now, in accordance with one of the earliest directives of the new management.

(Hmm, wonder if that had anything to do with why maritime  magnate Cuthbert Dickdier left the marina. Everyone knows he’s an undercover Ras-ventist, i.e. he doesn’t smoke pork.)

Now, a widely perceived campaign of discrimination is turning on other targets. Some tenants are reporting that management is arbitrarily increasing rents and the cost of other services. Some, even those not targeted, think they can see deliberate patterns of discrimination in the new management’s actions.

“I think when Didier sold the marina to IGY,” said one tenant, who still enjoys the management’s favor, ‘”he did the right thing, but he did it with the wrong people. Among the yachties, there’s joke that IGY means ‘Imbeciles Gone Yachting.’ They don’t understand anything about what makes a marina work. They’re just focused on collecting revenues.”

As the Kenny Anthony government continues its secret plans to use a massive expansion of the maritime sector, led in large measure by Taiwanese investment, the rapid decay of the infrastructure of yachting, exemplified by the ghettoization of Ganter’s and the discrimination at Rodney Bay is going to be an issue and an obstacle.

When the Taiwanese start to flood St Lucia with millions to register their yachts and fly the Neg Marron flag in their adventures all over the world,  will we also look to them for investors to improve the existing marinas and develop the unexploited natural bays around the island?

Or will we rest on our laurels and take the registration fees, letting all the plans in the quadrant development plan go to waste? Will we fall into bed with investors like IGY who want money but want nothing to do with shabines, much less niggers in all their variable forms as Rastas, Neg Marron, etc?

Will Didier and Kenny do something good, only to sell us out to some foreign fools, just the way it happened at IGY?

There is one man who can answer all these questions. But all efforts to make Kenny's maritime consultant, Cuthbert Didier spill the beans have proven fruitless. If the Taiwan-St Lucia yachting deal goes through in September of this year, Didier will be the go-to guy in the deal that rescues the St Lucia Labour Party from political destruction. He’s not going to want a political career, because he will be too busy learning new swimming techniques so that he does not drown in all the money that is going to rain on him.

In short, if this deal works, Didier is Labour’s favorite person in the world. And Labour will be sailing him all the way to the political bank. The last question now is, why would Labour be ditching Ausbert d’Auvergne’s quadrant development plan now when they need it the most?

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