Lazy Affairs
Lazy Affairs
I am late with this column today as a direct result of the term ‘laissez-faire’. I once heard someone pronounced it as ‘lazy fairs’. So the term ‘lazy affairs’ got stuck in my head ever since.
I looked it up online. Laissez-faire is a policy of minimum governmental interference in the economic affairs of individuals and society. The doctrine of laissez-faire is usually associated with the economists known as Physiocrats, who flourished in France from about 1756 to 1778. The term laissez-faire means, in French, “allow to do.”
I keep saying St. Maarten is a wild wild west. Anything goes. A free for all. The downside of that free for all attitude is that people also have a tendency to do what they want, when they want and how ever they want, if they do it at all.
It is even worst when they actually believed they are allowed to do whatever they want. That I blame on our government. We have officials in government who do as they please and we have ministers and parliamentarians doing whatever they want, whenever they want, however they want, if they ever do anything at all.
I mean, how bad can it be?
Here are some examples just from this past week alone.
A member of parliament convicted for rent and damages owed for thrashing a villa. Who does that? What kind of example are we setting this type of behavior? And no apologies or any sense of remorse.
Forget about the Bitcoin Cash nonsense that exposes government to unknown financial liabilities. Forget about a draft law that the Council of Advice shot down and that is now being peddled as a solution in Curacao. Forget all the other nonsense this one MP is known for. Clearly anything goes in St. Maarten and we accept it all without any pushback or condemnation.
And those who dare to speak out about this free for all, lazy-for-nothing-good behavior, they are the ones who actually get condemned, victimized and punished for daring to call out our elected and non-elected officials on their bullshit.
This is column is too short to further expound on any more examples of the wild wild west nature of things in St. Maarten.
What actually inspired me to descried these lazy affairs in this column today is the fact that we have a utility company (nutsbedrijf) that is proving to be as useless as the management they put in place to manage the company.
The head of the IT department who was responsible for making sure the integrity the company’s computer network was secured by carrying out necessary audits to make sure the security of the company’s systems remain intact, has been appointed as the company’s Chief Operating Officer (COO). Clearly, the good gentleman does not deserve this position. This hack is what we call in Dutch een verklaring (brevet) van onvermogen. This hack is a direct result of the lazy-good-for-nothing attitude we willingly and with open eyes, ears, mouth and arms condone in this country.
Until GEBE gets their IT systems back up and running, let’s see how much of our people will willingly go and pay their GEBE bills at the local banks or online via online banking. Bet you many will not make the effort and they will conveniently blame it on GEBE for not sending them a bill to pay.
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Originally published in Dutch on DossierKoninkrijksrelaties.nl as “Luie zaken“.
