By Alex Rosaria

It’s eerie to see how the ugly trends that we thought we had put behind us, have come back. I’m talking about effectively reversing decades of progress in disease prevention by anti-vaxxers based on unfounded fears that go back at least to the 18th century.
The Christian churches are back in politics with their big money completely ignoring a hard-fought separation of state and church. These unelected church bosses are advancing their extreme visions which deny equal rights for LGBTQ+ whilst at the same time hiding and denying the responsibility for committing sexual crimes against children, as they have always done.
The reproductive health rights of women are under pressure and the human rights of immigrants and refugees are not being respected despite pleas from international human rights organizations. The hard-fought battle for autonomy is being depleted, not by The Hague, but because of our inability to correctly manage our own affairs.
We have become immune, we accept and do not question our set of beliefs as citizens and keep voting for inept and corrupt politicians, even those who have been sentenced by independent courts.
What happened to us? Progress, social justice, and equality for all used to mean something. Leaders used to fight for equal rights and not discriminate against minority groups. We used to talk about inclusion, but now we separate groups into “us-and-them” and use it as a campaign promise.
Curaçao used to be a shiny star in the Caribbean that few surpassed. We had leaders like Dr. da Costa Gomez who taught us to lean on the strength of our belief in progress. Now, too many politicians and influencers prefer to teach us to rely on fear, conspiracy theories, bigotry, and hate. Do we stay the course and perish slowly?
~ Alex David Rosaria (53) is a freelance consultant active in Asia & Pacific. He is a former Member of Parliament, Minister of Economic Affairs, State Secretary of Finance and UN Implementation Officer in Africa and Central America. He’s from Curaçao and has a MBA from the University of Iowa (USA). ~

By Alex Rosaria

It’s eerie to see how the ugly trends that we thought we had put behind us, have come back. I’m talking about effectively reversing decades of progress in disease prevention by anti-vaxxers based on unfounded fears that go back at least to the 18th century.

Dear Editor,
So, a few weeks ago, you might remember, I wrote here how TelEm was in the process of trying to steal my money from me. They took a year’s worth of payments in advance, gave me a carved-in-stone receipt that says that, and then four months early they say, “sorry, you’re out of money.” I showed them their own receipt that says in real words “Paid in Full for One Year”. All dated and stamped. Their response was, “We’ll see and get back to you.” My tag line at the end of my last letter were words to the effect “Anyone want to bet how this will turn out?”
Well, now we know. TelEm is going to steal my money and not give me anything for it. In the law in the U.S. that’s called “Criminal Conversion” and it gets people thrown in jail and when it’s a company they get slammed with punitive damages sometimes in the six and seven figures.
I’m not sure what would happen here but I am sure the public prosecutor would just roll his eyes back and suggest that I get a life or something and the judge in the Court of First Instance would probably wonder why in hell I was wasting her time when she was looking at a court case for a couple hundred dollars. And they would both be correct. Courts and prosecutions are for serious business and a couple hundred dollars wouldn’t pay for the prosecutor’s lunch that day. So TelEm gets to steal my money and there is, effectively, nothing I can do about it.
After 20 years of being here you would think I would get used to it but it never ceases to annoy me.
So, I hump over to Coral and sign up over there. I have used them before and still do elsewhere and never had any meaningful complaints, so as an alternative to the thieves at TelEm, they were a perfectly good option. Turns out to be much better than that. Their service, which is exactly the same price as the thieves at TelEm, turns out to be functionally 3 times as fast. On paper the specs may be the same but in practice, WOW! It’s so much better that it’s scary.
And that’s the point here. Instead of TelEm being honest and simply giving me what they promised and that I paid for, they drove me to their competitor who, as it turns out, is superior in all respects. In business school they have a highly technical name for that. It’s called “being stupid”. And because they are monumentally stupid, now you and everyone else knows who you are dealing with when you walk through the doors of TelEm. If you trust them, you are being, well, stupid as well.
The moral of the story here is, if you have TelEm Internet, dump them for Coral. You will be much happier bunnies. I certainly am.

Steven Johnson

Dear Mr. Russell Simmons,
I read your letter from yesterday [Wednesday, October 19 – Ed.], and I have a very simple response to it. You are a racist. And you aren’t selective. You hate everybody equally. Americans, Indians, Chinese, Korean everybody that isn’t a local for you is an invader and not worthy of respect or dignity. A casual perusal of your writing over the years proves this beyond any doubt. If someone works harder or achieves more and they aren’t from “here” then they must be cheating somehow.
You think the Chinese are buying up the island? Here’s a news flash for you. You can’t buy something that isn’t for sale. You think there are too many stores owned by the Chinese? Where are your local owned stores? Did I miss the law that says locals can’t run supermarkets? You think the Indians have a monopoly on Front Street by some chicanery? Stop running your mouth and prove it.
You are what we used to call a “Zebra”. The reference is to referees in sports that wear striped shirts that stand around judging what other people do without ever having to do anything themselves. You write endlessly about the failures of others and the manifest problems all around you but offer nothing in the way of a rational or intelligent solution.
It’s simple, Russell, you think you have all the answers? Get elected to something and do the work. Back away from your keyboard and make a meaningful difference.
In your own inimitable style I’ll offer an anecdote from my childhood that might put your “Chinese problem” in perspective. I came from a neighborhood that was heavily industrial and bordered on what, before the days of politically-correct speech, was known as a ghetto. Rundown houses, burned-out shacks, rat-infested apartment buildings, etc. Then the Vietnam War ended and there was a great influx of Vietnamese refugees.
These people had nothing at all for the most part and a lot of them moved into that ghetto and a lot of the kids who spoke, essentially, no English, ended up in school with me. In the next four years those kids spoke better English than a lot of native speakers and that ghetto started to look like an upper-middle-class neighborhood. In 10 years it was a showpiece of beautiful houses and well-kept buildings and businesses. All owned and run by the Vietnamese.
So, one Sunday morning I am watching one of the local news channels and there is a panel discussion amongst certain local community activists and the Vietnamese civic leaders. The local activists were outraged at how the Vietnamese were all living in nice houses and driving nice cars and having nice businesses in the area now. And here is the punch line … the Vietnamese just looked at each other really confused and finally said, “Well, if it was so easy, why didn’t you do it?” And that is something you as a person, Russell, really need to get a handle on. Why do the Chinese and the Indians and all the rest have what they have? Simple. Because they are willing to do the work. And for that they deserve your respect. Not your disdain hatred and suspicion.
Let’s use a litmus test here. Quick, of the scooter gangs and kids doing wheel-stands up the middle of the roads how many are Chinese or Indian or anything other than locals for that matter? That’s where work ethic is developed. At home when kids are young.
Condemning a culture like the Chinese because they work harder and smarter than you is the mark of an ignorant man. And Russell, you have that mark in spades.

Steven Johnson

Dear Chairman and Members of the Committee on Kingdom Relations of TK and EK,

Today a bill about public transport. I read in the answers to Parliamentary questions by State Secretary in response to questions about this that public transport is a matter for the island government and not for the government in The Hague. As you have come to expect from me, I zoom in on St. Eustatius, assuming that things are not very different on Bonaire and Saba. After all, I know the situation on St. Eustatius best (compared to the other islands in the BES-area).
When the Secretary of State refers to the local island government, of course, she is talking about buses and similar public transport in the European Netherlands. But on Statia, the Makana ferry was "pushed through" by the national government. There is nothing local about that. Although the exact figures are not known to me, I cannot imagine that this ferry – which in practice has been taken out of service quite frequently because of repairs – is profitable. Without the subsidy promised by The Hague, I believe this service would have been bankrupt long ago with which this ferry would no longer exist. It does not seem to me a difficult prediction that this will still happen when the subsidy source ceases to exist. And should I be wrong, at least the price will develop to unaffordable proportions.
Another form of public transportation on the island is intra-island travel. Winair (97% owned by the country of St. Maarten and 3% by the country of the Netherlands) provides this, at least for St. Eustatius, in a monopolistic market position. Simply because other providers are not tolerated by Winair (and in its wake, therefore, neither by the country of the Netherlands). In my opinion, the market system so applauded by this Cabinet does not tolerate monopoly as a market form, but yes, the Caribbean Netherlands seems to be hidden from the eye of media that are considered mainstream in the European Netherlands, so the Cabinet also is turning a blind eye here for its own role stability. It is my personal belief that a little investigative journalist is bound to encounter more disturbances when he or she dives into cases like Makana and Winair.
When I think about Winair, automatically another half-baked and especially unsound document (when a serious competitor of Winair is emphatically left out, I call the investigation unsound) from two years ago pops into my head. The project in question was Titan, whose document (Oct. 14, 2020) addressed Phase A of a project. Titan was the chosen code name by which Winair was referred to (not much imagination required for that) and I never heard of either Titan or any other phase of that project.
Another document that comes to my mind in this context is one that the drafter had already completed in 2018, but the government chose not to present it to you until spring 2019. It is about "Connectivity Caribbean part of the Kingdom". This document speaks of thin routes and market failures and cites the PSO (public service obligation) as the preferred policy option. But yes, to a cabinet unwilling to develop the Caribbean Netherlands, good advice is like pearls before swine. Therefore, nothing seems to have happened with this report. In March 2019 – partly as a result of this report – I have already written to you with the suggestion to set up public air transport on the basis of this PSO (whereby, by the way, I think others than Winair should also be able to bid for it) and – in one fell swoop – to understand air transport in medical cases below (with the knowledge of today I am thinking of both Bonaire and St. Maarten, with the possibility of landing as close to the hospital as possible).
A previous Rutte administration did not show much enthusiasm or receptivity; perhaps things will improve now (although my hopes are also a bit vain, given the experience to date...).
Note: Consideration could be given to setting up the ferry under PSO as well. For completeness, I refer you to my earlier letters I have written over time regarding the intra-island connectivity (of St. Eustatius).
Finally, a thought: A law should be amended to include inter island traffic as public transportation. I understand that for the purposes of the Makana, a trick was performed to this end (which, incidentally, I do not know the content of). Particularly for transport between the public entities of Saba, St. Eustatius and Bonaire, it seems to me perfectly defensible to designate intra-island traffic – both sailing and flying – as "local" and "public.

J.H.T. (Jan) Meijer