Published 1 February 2018
Buckie Got It, St. Kitts and Nevis News Source
By: Media Source
BHS is blinding evidence of the Team Unity
government’s incompetence, deceit and trickery
Basseterre, St. Kitts, February 1, 2018 – The handling of the Basseterre High School saga by the Team Unity Government of Prime Minister Dr. Timothy Harris highlights the unprecedented greed and total mismanagement of the nation’s resources.
“In just three short years, the people of the Federation have realised that they were lied to. The coalition government’s actions have in many instances, resulted in increased stress and strain on our people. In other instances, their foolhardiness has resulted in unwarranted increased public debt, the endangerment of precious and scarce resources like our aquifer at Ponds Estate, and the sharp loss of millions of dollars in public funds due to corruption, graft, and unprecedented greed and mismanagement,” said Dr. Earl Asim Martin, Deputy Political Leader of the opposition St. Kitts-Nevis Labour Party (SKNLP).
He told an SKNLP press conference Wednesday that the Basseterre High School issue is “blinding evidence of the government’s incompetence, deceit and trickery.”
“After convincing much of the population that there was something fundamentally and irreparably wrong with the BHS’s original compound, despite the reports from top local, regional and international scientific research and testing agencies that indicated the complete opposite, the government has decided to construct a new BHS directly on the island’s single largest source of water inside the Basseterre Valley National Park, an area designated as a national park and protected by legislation,” said Dr. Martin, a former health and public works minister.
Dr. Martin pointed out that if the Harris Government repeals that legislation to accommodate a lie and a farce, “our island will lose the most abundant and longest serving source of fresh water for years to come due to contamination from heavy metals from the school’s chemistry labs, sewage, and general industrial run-off.”
“To state the obvious, this CANNOT be allowed to happen,” he told an SKNLP press conference on Wednesday.
Prime Minister Harris and his Minister of Education, Shawn Richards, have been playing politics with the BHS issue before they took office and since taking the reins of government in February 2015, rejected all the scientific reports from local scientists, the Trinidad-based Caribbean Public Health Agency (CARPHA), the Caribbean Industrial Research Institute ( CARIRI), also based in Trinidad and the Washington-based National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which recommended that the buildings could be inhabited after remedial works are completed.
Although the reports were rejected, Harris’ PLP/CCM/PAM Government still removed three buildings from the original site and is using them as classrooms and to house the principal’s office at Taylors.
Desk, chairs, tables and air condition units were also removed and installed at the temporary BHS facility as well, as he Verchild’s High School and other schools.
With the Team Unity abandoning the original BHS location, students have been displaced in cramped temporary facilities and denied adequate home economics, information technology, biology, physics and chemistry labs.
West Basseterre Member of Parliament Hon. Konris Maynard has repeatedly lamented that thousands of students will move from the first form to the fifth form without enjoying “that wholesome BHS experience” as classrooms are still located in buildings at various locations including the Washington Archibald High School (WAHS), Premier Dental Lab and the Beach-Allen Primary School.
Several of the persons including principal Mrs. Carleen Henry-Morton, Guidance Councillor, Ron Collins and Thelma Phillip-Browne, who perpetuated the conspiracy, have abandoned the teachers, students and parents.
Morton is Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Tourism, Collins is Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Labour and Browne is St. Kitts and Nevis’ Ambassador to the United States.
Ironically, the ministries of Labour and Tourism are currently experiencing mold problems.
Photo 1 – The Western Campus of the Basseterre High School
Photo 2 – Dr. Timothy Harris (right) and Shawn Richards
Photo 3 – Classes being held in the open of the new facility at Taylors
