Caribbean & Central America - March 2015 (ISSN 1741-4458)

*** INGLORIOUS END TO DENZIL DOUGLAS. The now ousted prime minister of St Kitts & Nevis, Denzil Douglas, spent the last two years of his fourth term avoiding a no confidence motion that he and his centre-left St Kitts & Nevis Labour Party (SKNLP) could not win due to defections. He finally met his fate on 16 February, but even then the controversy didn’t end as it took two days for the election results to be declared and more than two weeks for the official results to be released. It was an inglorious end for Douglas, and a poor advertisement for Caribbean democracy given that St Kitts & Nevis has an electorate of only 30,000 people.

The delay in announcing the outcome of the election led to public criticism from Prime Ministers Perry Christie of The Bahamas, Keith Mitchell of Grenada, Ralph Gonsalves of St Vincent & the Grenadines, and Kamla Persad-Bissessar of Trinidad & Tobago.

Persad-Bissessar summed up the mood of Douglas’s neighbours over the delay when she said: “I am concerned that the region’s reputation for democracy and for free and fair elections will be under threat…”

Despite all Douglas’s ducking and diving, and no doubt in part because of it, the Team Unity alliance under SKNLP defector Timothy Harris won seven out of the 11 contested seats. The SKNLP won three seats while its ally the Nevis Reformation Party (NRP) held one.

The Team Unity alliance is made up of the People’s Action Movement (PAM), the Concerned Citizens’ Movement (CCM), and the People’s Labour Party (PLP) of SKNLP defectors Harris and Sam Condor. Of the coalition’s seven seats, four went to PAM, two to the CCM, and one to the PLP (Harris, with Condor losing his seat to the SKNLP challenger).

On taking office, Harris moved quickly to assure investors that his government would be “business friendly” and that the “democratic fibre of the country was one that would ensure stability”.

*** JAMAICA CONTINUES TO PLEASE. In late February, Jamaica had its long-term foreign and local currency ratings affirmed by Fitch Ratings at ‘B-‘. The outlook on its long-term issuer default ratings (IDRs) was revised to positive from stable.

The reasons for the revised outlook were given as: diminishing external financing risks; continuing progress on fiscal and structural adjustment (Fitch said that Jamaica is on course to meet its 7.5% of GDP fiscal surplus target for the second successive fiscal year in FY 2014/15); and signs of economic revival (which Fitch noted was “growing at an underlying rate of almost 2% before being hit by a sharp contraction in agriculture in the second half of 2014”).

Nevertheless, the ratings agency warned, Jamaica’s debt burden is still the fourth highest among rated sovereigns and well above the ‘B’ median. It notes that “even after the debt exchange, interest payments account for 28% of spending”. Furthermore, 61% of government debt is denominated in foreign currency.

There is no sign of any backsliding in Jamaica, hence the upgraded outlook, but Fitch did still warn: “Failure to adhere to the IMF programme would remove a source of balance of payments support and hurt private sector and creditor confidence, renewing concerns about fiscal and external financing.”

• “The now ousted prime minister of St Kitts & Nevis, Denzil Douglas, spent the last two years of his fourth term avoiding a no confidence motion that he and his centre-left St Kitts & Nevis Labour Party (SKNLP) could not win due to defections. He finally met his fate on 16 February, but even then the controversy didn’t end as it took two days for the election results to be declared and more than two weeks for the official results to be released. It was an inglorious end for Douglas, and a poor advertisement for Caribbean democracy given that St Kitts & Nevis has an electorate of only 30,000 people.”