Principal says minister asked him to falsify voter registration docs

A school principal on pre-retirement leave is urging the opposition to remain vigilant about voter registration, saying that a minister of government had asked him to facilitate the illegal registration of a non-national.

Adonis Charles, who supported the Unity Labour Party ULP) in 2020 but has joined the opposition New Democratic Party’s campaign in North Leeward, gave the warning during a village meeting in his home village, Fitz Hughes.

“Let me give a warning to those in administration in the New Democratic Party, Dr. [Godwin] Friday and others: keep your eyes on the registration. Right now, you can go to the Registry and you can get a form for a birth certificate already filled and signed,” Charles said.

“When I was principal in Barrouallie Anglican School for nine years, I got a call from a sitting minister, … and he said, ‘Charles, I want a favour.’

“I said, ‘What is it?’ He said that there’s a guy in Bottle and Glass who is from St. Lucia wants to get a birth certificate to get an ID, and if I can write a letter to say that he came to the school and to say when he was registered.

“I said to him, I will do no such thing,” Charles said.

“Don’t take your eyes off of them because they are wicked and they are spiteful and have a hate against North Leeward, but we will rise up under the New Democratic Party,” Charles said. Right now, North Leeward has no representation in the Parliament,” he said.

In 2020, Carlos James of the ULP won the North Leeward seat by a single vote after a contentious recount.

James defeated the NDP’s Roland “Patel” Matthews on his second attempt, after Matthews held on to the seat for a second term in 2015 by 12 votes.

Charles described James as “very arrogant and insensitive”, noting that as people were trying to evacuate from North Leeward the night before La Soufriere volcano erupted, “he gone on the wharf to tell people to take [the COVID-19] vaccine. People were scared for their lives.

“Then he went and talked a set of foolishness about the quarry,” Charles said, adding that this was “another lie that they told us”.

In January 2022, residents of Fitz Hughes and other North Leeward communities who farm in Richmond received news that a tractor was ploughing through their fields.


They later learnt that the government had leased 58.8 acres of prime agricultural lands to Gajadhar for EC$12,000 a year to operate a quarry for 30 years.

Shortly after, Charles emerged as a strong critic of the ULP over the quarry deal, which will see the government getting EC$2 for each tonne of aggregate that the quarry produces.

In his speech in Fitz Hughes, Charles noted that the government had said that the quarry was necessary to build the port in Kingstown.

“… it was all a lie, because the study for the port, of which I have a copy, shows that there were four options considered to do port in Kingstown,” he said, referring to the choices the government had regarding reclaiming land to build the port, which is slated to reopen next month.

“The first option was to use land-based material. But the study showed that if you put all the quarries in St. Vincent and the Grenadines together, they were not able to fill the port in the three-month period,” he said, adding that 900 million cubic meters of material was needed.

“The reason why the port is sinking right now is that they use the cheapest option, which is to use material from off Argyle and put it there. That is why the port is in the situation that it is.”

Some people have been referring to the project as the “sinking port” after some of the piles declutched, resulting in the reclamation material leaking into the sea, leaving large pools of water inside the quay wall.

The government has said that the problem has been fixed.

Charles also said that the ULP made “a mess” of education.

“We never had an education revolution. We had an education indoctrination… Last school year, I had to beg for common toilet paper, chalk and duplicating paper to give to people children,” he said.

“Where is all the money they borrow? Where is it going?” he said, adding that in 2014, the government took seven months’ National Insurance Services (NIS) contributions from workers and did not hand it over to the NIS.

“Where is the money? All the money that you didn’t pay the workers, you dismiss the teachers and the police. Where is that money? Bring that money to us now and deal with the situation.”

He also criticised the government its food packages, called “Love Boxes”, saying they only contain “the same food that will give people hypertension and diabetes.

“They pack it up in the box and hospital aint’ geh no medication for them,” Charles said.

“If NDP were to give a Love Box, we are going to put in multivitamins in that box. We are going to include a $100 voucher to get fish or even poultry in that box for our children,” he said.  

“We have to sit down and work out the plan for agriculture, because that’s one of the productive sectors. So instead of exporting all the produce, we can do our own dasheen flour, our dasheen chips, our tannia chips, our plantain chips,” he said.

Charles said that under the NDP, the hospital in Chateaubelair will be upgraded to do blood tests, rather than residents having to go to Kingstown.

“Instead of going to Barrouallie to pay your driver’s license and your liquor license, we can bring all this to North Leeward,” he said.