Dear Editor,

Telem Group (St. Maarten Telecommunication Operating Company – SMTOC), the government-owned company, is the leading provider of telecommunications services in Sint Maarten. Despite being a leader in the field, for the past decade Telem is without a CEO.

Currently, the company is being guided by a management team chaired by the CFO – Ms. Helma Etnel, a Suriname national. She was appointed by the supervisory board originally chaired by Mr. Rafael Boasman, and now chaired by Mr. Jairo Bloem who finally initiated the CEO recruitment. And that is only the tip of the iceberg for Telem’s poor state.

Telem became an autonomous company with its own managing director and staff due to catastrophic hurricane Luis in 1995. The hurricane caused chaos with widespread service outages and service disruptions. The first managing director without any supervision from Curaçao was Mr. Curtis Haynes who developed Telem’s Internet, mobile and international services. Since his dismissal 10 years ago the company has been without a CEO.

In 1998, the telecommunications market in St. Maarten was liberalized, but Telem failed to seize the opportunity. It entered the market competing against already established players in the industry such as Antelecom -formerly Landsradio- and ECC which was the first mobile operator on Saint Martin. The East Caribbean Cellular, privately owned by US entrepreneur Barfield, is an example to foreign-owned companies in the field, remaining stagnant in the market until sold. In ECC’s case, it was sold for close to US $16 million to Cellular One, and eventually never surviving the GSM wave, went bankrupt.

Inside Telem, Management of the company has not been selected on merit, but with favouritism and political connections instead. Previous managers’ names have been linked to everything from failed television project scandals to recreational travels at the company’s expense and all the way to rumours of romantic involvements with co-workers. Needless to say, pervious management was a failure on the professional side of things as well, not being able to forward the company technologically-wise or in services provided.

A few years ago Peter Drenth, a specialist from the Netherlands was brought in and managed to revitalize a stagnant company. Unfortunately, Drenth’s contract was not extended since he felt the best course of action was for the government to sell the company. It all kept going downhill for the company since.

Today in St. Maarten, home Internet customers are confronted with a plethora of problems on a daily basis, ranging from poor connection, slow speeds to some of the highest service-costs in the region. This is compounded by subpar customer care as the company has proven itself unable to adequately address service outages. Not to mention Telem’s inability to meet the demands of thousands of new customers when the company is plagued by dropped calls, slow mobile Internet, new competition as well as expensive local and roaming rates.

In conclusion, Telem has failed to live up to its mission statement “to be the best service provider in Sint Maarten with the best technology!” and until now is unable to deliver a consistent quality product of internet or mobile affordable to everyone.

The same Telem that is owned by the government of Sint Maarten that should be held accountable for the mismanagement – that was supposed to be a national engine of growth, is a company that is not helping to progress Sint Maarten’s economy. St. Maarten is a top Caribbean destination with great potential, and it deserves first class service from its own company to be provided to its people and its tourists.

Zohar Gurevich

Dear Editor,

Fuel oil currently drives our national economy. If NV GEBE (utility company) did not receive a shipment of fuel for whatever reason, and the company’s reserves were to run out, the country’s economy would come to a complete standstill. This would costs millions of dollars in lost business, and would also have serious consequences for our tourism and travel sector.

Dear Editor,

Several years ago, Congress approved a bipartisan agreement for an interim budget resulting from negotiations between Paul Ryan, Chairman of the Budget Committee of the House of Representatives and Patty Murray, Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee. The main feature of this agreement was the elimination of some of the features of the sequester program which became effective in 2013 and cut expenditures for government programs across the board.

Ryan was willing to agree to the bipartisan plan because under sequester, there were automatic reductions in military expenditures. Patty Murray accepted the plan because it did away with sequester reductions in programs aimed at benefitting the poor and needy in the country, which the Republicans would like to see reduced.

Let’s look at military costs, which the Republicans always promote. First of all, the budget submitted by the Pentagon in 2010 represented slightly more than 20 percent of the total budget. In 2000 this budget was US $294 billion whereas in 2011 it was $710 billion. But when you added other additional military costs enacted by Congress, many involving local programs which benefit well connected constituents, military costs are closer to 50 percent of the total budget. Indeed, total military expenditures in the United States approximate the military budgets of all other countries.

I will focus on just one program enacted by Congress which the Pentagon said it did not need or want. This is the so-called “alternate engine” for the P-35 fighters manufactured by General Electric. The Pentagon already has engines for its new fighter manufactured by Pratt and Whitney. George Bush in 2006 and President Obama in 2009 asked Congress not to fund the alternate engine, but it refused to comply, and in 2011, GE charged $3 billion for its work on what is clearly a redundant and unnecessary military item.

This is just one of a number of Congressional handouts to companies for weapon systems, not wanted by the Pentagon but pushed primarily by Republicans who believe that you never can spend too much on the military, particularly if you help a wealthy constituent financially at the same time. These unnecessary corporate subsidies increase military spending significantly.

The other reason for the large deficit increase over the past ten years is the fact that the US began two unfunded wars (e.g. in 2011 the cost of the war in Afghanastan was $10 billion each month), but beyond that problem, tax revenues have greatly decreased during that period. The revenue in 2010 was the lowest it has been since 1950. This loss has resulted in large part as the result of tax reductions George Bush initiated in 2001 and 2003, which were meant to be temporary.

The Republicans, however, refuse to allow any increases in taxes, even including bringing taxes back to the level they were before those “temporary” reductions.

Increase military expenditures and obstruct any increase in tax revenue: Is this a sound and feasible policy?

Stephen A. Hopkins

Firstly, I must give recognition to Peter Horsfall and Lucy Bennet for their research paper: Thinking Hats in Primary School – From thinking skills to thinking curriculum. Their article featured in the College of Teachers’ Journal Education Today, Vol.55 Number 1, March 2005, PP20-29 who shed more lights on the above topic through the use of De Bono’s technique, to support the development of thinking skills in primary schools across the United Kingdom.

Background information: Edward De Bono was born in Malta, 19th May, 1933. He graduated with a doctorate degree from University of Malta in Clinical Psychology and Physiology. University of Malta is one of the oldest universities in the world, established in 1592. He also obtained other degrees in psychology and physiology from other world- renowned educational institutions, such as, Oxford, London, Cambridge and Harvard.

Napoleon seized control of Malta in 1798, and the British took it in 1800. The country gained independence from Britain in 1964, and became a republic in 1974. Edward De Bono became famous when he developed his Six Colours Thinking Hats methods as a mean of analysing a problem or situation before deciding appropriate courses of action. “In everyday thinking we often try to do too much at once”, said De Bono.

De Bono developed many strategies for lateral and parallel problem-solving techniques used in schools and businesses today. His Six Thinking Hats’ technique to support the development of thinking skills in primary schools gained world-wide recognition in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and up to today. “If you wait opportunity to occur, you will be of the crowd”, said De Bono. In analysing the different colours hats, De Bono said that the White Hat represents “facts”, not facts from opinion, but real facts to be objective and being neutral. The Black Hat represents cautious thinking. For example, safety, care, or phrase such as, “Look before you leap”.

Situation: When teachers asked their colleagues to wear “Black” during an affirmative action, according to De Bono’s Black Hat thinking – something is wrong and needs urgent attention. Our experts in the field of education should be aware that there is a problem to be solved under this colour activity. Now, suppose the teachers were told to wear the “Colour Red” this is another cause of parallel thinking where emotion and intuition provide opportunity to explore feeling about a situation that might not always be considered in a discussion.

The Blue Hat thinking in solving a country’s budget problem: The Blue Hat thinking represents managing and organizing thinking. “What have we done so far?” and “What do we do next?” We could add Yellow Hat thinking with the Blue Hat in making things happen. However, there is nothing difficult about budgets. Under these two colours thinking hats, managers and supervisors should be given flexibility in their department budgets. They must feel that a budget for his or her department is realistic and not because their superiors think it is too high. The majority of countries in the world do not have a balanced budget. Many times a budget cannot balance is because of lack of control and corrupted figures in the budgets.

If we cannot balance our National Budget, take the example from the French. In France, 126,000 young people are unemployed, so the French decided to raise 400 million euros to compensate for the unemployment. The 400 million euros were not on their budget, but it must come from somewhere. The French decided to give each unemployed 650 euros per month to help solve the problem. They have decided to make the big businesses pay more taxes for not hiring permanent workers. Here is where the 400 million euros came from. We must control the inflow of cash – cash flow is the life source of any business. Cutting back too much from the budget has a serious effect on moving the country forward in case of national urgency.

The Green Hat thinking represents moving forward with ideas such as, “What else could we do?” And the Yellow Hat concludes it all: Making things happen. Finally, in schools students are reminded that the colour hat thinking is not for aggression purposes, but rather for creative thinking and problem solving. We could use them to group students, put people in different colour houses is fun in schools, such as belonging to the Blue House, White or Black House. This will help in the development of thinking skills and compete with each other in different houses with their favourite colours. No teachers and classrooms should do without these books from Edward De Bono’s collection.

Joseph Harvey