The Elevation of Memory of Failure Over Memory of Success

I watched it happen to the Dame, Mary Eugenia Charles, Dominica’s only successful Prime Minister (PM) before Roosevelt Skerrit. The first person to be popularly elected PM after Independence, in 1980. Re-elected in 1985. Re-elected in 1990, with a one-seat majority. And although she served for five more years, until 1995, Dominica had already moved on.

            I did not like the Dame’s politics. It was backward. She restored the old aristocrats to prominence. She sold out Dominica’s Independence in foreign policy. But she was a successful governor. She learned to operate the Independence Constitution. Until Skerrit, she was the only PM of six to be re-elected. That is governance success. However, Dominica more easily remembers and honors failures than successes. Listening to Opposition figures in Dominica today talk about former PMs Patrick John and Edison James, you would think it was they who served three consecutive terms.

            Patrick John was deposed for selling nearly half of Dominica to the Ku Klux Klan and selling out Nelson Mandela and South Africa. He lied about it till his dying days. Yet, today he has brazen apologists in Dominica. Edison James was vengeful and a poor governor who plunged Dominica into economic crisis. He was voted out after one term. Yet today, his apologists portray the James years as glory days. John and James apologists now make common cause, seeking to eviscerate voting rights that people died to secure. Meanwhile, the inheritors of the Dame’s party cannot articulate one of her political principles. They are making common cause with John apologists and James apologists who smeared her image and destroyed memory of her success.

            I am not doing politics here. Skerrit can take care of himself politically. Not only will he be Dominica’s first PM to exit voluntarily, he will also be the first to exit with more seats, 19, than he entered, 10. And more seats than anyone in Dominica’s political history.

            I am doing culture—forgetfulness. The Dame was so demonized by current James apologists that no one learned a lesson about her success—except Skerrit. By forgetting the Dame, three regimes failed. Until Skerrit.

            The destroyers of memory of Dominica’s successes are at it again, promoting memory of failure, destroying memory of governance successes. The leadership lessons of Dominica’s two governance success, the Dame and Skerrit must be extracted and codified.

Dominica cannot forever go in circles!