Shevern urges former students to elect her as MP

The opposition New Democratic Party’s (NDP) candidate Shevern John has urged her former students to elect her as their MP, saying that they would like to pass on the seat to one of them at the end of her tenure.

John, a senator, is making her second attempt to win the seat after her first bid, in 2020, failed by 62 votes.

She is slated to face off in the upcoming general election, expected next month but due by February, against the ruling Unity Labour Party’s Grace Walters, the hospital administrator, who is making her first outing at the polls.

John acknowledged the young people in the crowd at the NDP’s Warm Up Rally in London on Saturday, but targeted her message at her former students at the Georgetown and Sandy Bay secondary schools.

“… I see many of them in the crowd here today. I have moulded you. I have given my best to you to ensure that you pass your exams, and I am proud that you have become the professional that you are today. Wherever the life path you take, I am proud of you,” John said.

She said that her students can say that she delivered to them.

“I gave off my lunch time. I played netball with them. I trained them in various sporting and academic disciplines,” she said, adding that her former charges will also say that she disciplined them when necessary.

“They know how hard working I have been as their teacher. Students, young people, I am saying to you tonight, I never run from you like an abandoned mother who just deliver the baby and leave it there,” John said.

“I stick with you through the thick and the thin. When you bawl, me bawl too, because we love cry,” she said, partly in the Vincentian vernacular.

“And when they left school, I will always check in on them, because something I said to them, when you leave me, you are becoming a better woman or man in society. So, I am not only looking for you now that it is election time.”

John urged her former students not to allow anyone to treat them like “a political pawn, coming to you and offering you short-term jobs, only to have you discarded when the votes are counted.

“We say, no way. Let me be clear, a three-month contract is not a future. A stipend that disappears after the campaign is not empowerment. And the government that sees you as a vote bank, not as a nation builder, is failing its duty.”

John said she values each of her former students and sees them as a nation builder, adding, “That’s why I went the extra mile to make sure that you come out something good in society.”

She said the short-term jobs that the ULP administration is giving are just distractions.

“They’re only meant to say, ‘Gi aryo something so vote for me.’

“But hey, tha nah nutt’n for you. Take it and know that you should be a nation builder, and you can only be a nation builder under the New Democratic Party.

“Young people, my students, I will say to you over and over again, you deserve more than a season, you deserve a strategy. You deserve training, you deserve mentoring. You deserve meaningful employment.

“You deserve to be part of the economy. You deserve a career, not the crumbs from the table. Therefore, you must demand better and better can only come from the Youth Guarantee Pledge that this prime minister-elect … has signed over a year ago,” she said, referring to Opposition Leader and NDP president, Godwin Friday.

The NDP’s Youth Guarantee Pledge, which Friday signed with the party’s youth arm in October 2023, says that by the end of the first term of an NDP government, every young person in St. Vincent and the Grenadines would have the opportunity of a job, or a training programme, or a place or an internship with an employer.

John said it is time for her former students to vote for the NDP.

“It’s time to vote for your teacher, your caring mother, who sees you not as voting cattle, but as a citizen with dignity, as a citizen with worth, and as a citizen with dreams.

“A teacher who values you and sees your worth from the time you set your foot into the classroom, one who does not see you as a temporary voter, as a temporary person, but one who sees you as a permanent citizen of St Vincent and the Grenadines, and one who deserves better,” John said.

“So don’t trade your future for anyone who does not care about you but only cares about a vote

I am ready to deliver. I am ready to build a future for you, and I am willing after to pass the baton on to one of you, my students.”

John also used her speech to outline her plans for North Windward.