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By Hilbert Haar
The dog fight between the board of the Unified Resilient St. Maarten Movement (URSM) and its minister of Public Health, Social Development and Labor Richinel Brug marks a new low point in political discourse.
Attorney Brenda Brooks, who is the president of the URSM-board wrote a letter that contains plenty of accusations that would make most politicians run for the hills. But Minister Brug showed that he has plenty of backbone and, even better, that he has plenty of ammunition to dismiss the allegations against him.
It is for an outsider impossible to predict how all this will end but one thing is certain: Brug stood up for what he believes in. In the process he pointed the finger at Prime Minister Mercelina, accusing him of leaking confidential internal information and of the one responsible for what one could call a reign of terror within the administration building.
So now the shoe is on the other foot and Mercelina has some explaining to do. It is not exactly a compliment when a senior civil servant asks to work from home when Mercelina functions as Acting Minister of VSA. One may well wonder: what on earth is going on there?
Another question is obviously: how will the Mercelina-government hold everything together? St. Maarten is not exactly waiting for the umpteenth fall of a government followed by new elections.
The long and short of it is that there is a lot of repair work to be done. Minister Brug has already indicated that he is prepared to do that, providing that there is mutual respect and a genuine commitment to serving the people of St. Maarten.
In this respect the shoe is also on the other foot. Is the prime minister prepared to swallow his pride and to restore order? If everything board-president Brooks wrote is false, and Brug’s reaction is anchored in facts, something will have to give.
I doubt very much whether there will ever again be a normal relationship between PM Mercelina and Minister Brug, in spite of the latter’s best efforts.
This raises the question why, as Brug recounts, the party wants him removed from his position. If you asked me (but nobody does), then the party has most likely already a replacement in mind. Maybe somebody who is not a stickler for the rules, somebody who will bend them if Prime Minister Mercelina ask him (or her) to do so.
I don’t know any of this, of course, but if it ever comes to replacing minister Brug, I would look very careful at this person’s background and his (or her) relationship to the prime minister and to others who stand to benefit from such an appointment.
In the meantime, the reputation of the prime minister and that of his board-president Brooks is down the drain. That is not something to be happy about, because in is really, really sad.
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