By Marlon Bute
Sometimes a document answers questions. Sometimes it raises more.
Since I wrote “95 Acres, One Small Island: Who Gets to Own Bequia?”, the matter has continued to attract considerable interest. Some readers commented publicly beneath the article on iWitness News. Others have stopped me on the streets, telephoned or otherwise reached out to discuss it. I am also aware of interest among persons occupying senior positions in our country, including at the level of government.
The interest, therefore, crosses the usual lines, and that is hardly surprising. We are speaking about approximately 95 acres on an island of only about seven square miles, and land which the government of St. Vincent and the Grenadines (GoSVG) itself once declared to be of national interest.
The comments beneath my earlier article are worth acknowledging. William H. Harriss argued that the matter deserved a legal and public inquiry. Alimantado Chatawa placed it within the wider difficulty ordinary Vincentians face in acquiring land. TAD wondered whether there was more to the sequence of events than has so far been explained. Kelvin George did an especially interesting piece of arithmetic. Using the reported purchase price, he calculated that the land was acquired for approximately 97 EC cents per square foot and he wondered what it would mean if the average Vincentian could acquire land at anything approaching that price.
All of this becomes more interesting when one reads the letter written by then Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves on Aug. 4, 2017.
It was addressed to attorney Errol Layne, who represented Ms Carol McIntosh, the beneficial owner of the 95 acres at Spring, Bequia. Its subject was unambiguous: “Repurchase of Ninety-Five Acres of Land at Bequia”.
Gonsalves wrote that he had been advised that Ms McIntosh had decided to sell the lands. He then stated that the government of St. Vincent and the Grenadines was interested in “purchasing/acquiring these lands at a fair and reasonable price”. The government requested the possible sale price, title, and conditions of sale.
Those words deserve more attention than I gave them in my first article.
The letter does not simply say that the government wished to purchase the property. It says purchasing/acquiring. An ordinary purchaser can make an offer and, if the owner refuses, walk away disappointed. Government is not an ordinary purchaser. The state has powers, subject to the Constitution and law, to acquire private property for a legitimate public purpose upon payment of adequate compensation.
The Gonsalves administration was certainly familiar with those powers. As I pointed out previously, in 2020 it moved to compulsorily acquire approximately three acres of Murray family lands at Richmond Hill. Gonsalves publicly defended that intervention as necessary to prevent families living there from becoming homeless.
But there is an even more consequential sentence in the 2017 letter.
Gonsalves urged the attorney to indicate to Ms McIntosh “and any other prospective purchaser” that the GoSVG had “a national interest in developing the lands”.
Those are not insignificant words. The government was not merely window-shopping for real estate. The prime minister was putting the owner, and expressly any other prospective purchaser, on notice that the state had identified a national interest in the development of these lands.
So what happened to that national interest?
We have been told that the owners later indicated through their lawyer that they were not interested in selling to the government. Gonsalves has said that his government had nothing to do with his son’s later acquisition and that he was unaware when Storm purchased the property.
Yet, in the same press conference, he declared that it was an arm’s-length transaction. How could he know enough to vouch for the nature of a transaction he said he did not know had occurred? Those statements should form part of any fair consideration of the matter. But they do not exhaust the questions raised by the letter, particularly when the government itself contemplated purchasing or acquiring the lands and had formally declared a national interest in them.
Was the property independently valued? Was the matter brought before Cabinet? Was compulsory acquisition considered? Were further negotiations attempted? At what point did the government determine that it would no longer pursue the 95 acres, and why?
There ought to be a documentary trail capable of answering at least some of these questions. The prime minister’s letter was copied to the chief surveyor, the director general of finance and planning and the CEO of National Properties Limited. Important arms of the state were therefore formally brought into the conversation.
And then came the development which makes the chronology even more worthy of examination. The government did not acquire the lands. Some years later, Storm Gonsalves, son of the prime minister who had written the 2017 letter, acquired those same approximately 95 acres. Storm has since publicly confirmed that he and partners own the property, describing the purchase as an arm’s-length transaction made during the depths of COVID and saying that some of the acreage is cliffside. He has also acknowledged that the property is worth more today than when it was purchased.
The point is not to manufacture an answer. It is to ask the questions that naturally arise from the sequence. What happened between the government declaring a national interest in these lands and their eventual acquisition by the then prime minister’s son and his partners? When did the government cease pursuing them? Why? What was their assessed value? What, if anything, followed from the circulation of the 2017 letter among the public agencies to which it was copied?
There is a larger principle here, too, and it ought not to require much explaining. We must all operate on the same field of play. Colour, class, wealth, family name, political connections, whether past or present, and proximity to power cannot become passports to immunity from legitimate questioning, nor should they provide absolution from whatever the answers to those questions may reveal.
The standard must be the same for everyone. That is part of the SVG we ought to be building, one in which every black boy and every black girl, and every Vincentian of whatever colour or circumstance, can believe that opportunity is not reserved for a particular class, family or circle, and that neither is accountability reserved for everybody else. Our country is simply too small, our opportunities too precious and our land too finite for us to accept anything less.
There is another development worth noting, although I will leave its fuller examination for another time. A sign now standing at Spring advertises “Azure Estate Bequia”, describing an exclusive land development with lots for sale, proposed villas and a clubhouse. Whatever else may eventually be established about the development, it is an interesting evolution in the story of land of which we were previously reminded that a huge portion was cliffside.
For now, however, the 2017 letter is enough.
The new NDP government is particularly well placed to follow where it leads. It has access to the records of the state and can determine whether there was a valuation, whether Cabinet considered the property, what correspondence followed the August 2017 letter, what role National Properties Limited or other agencies played, and whether acquisition was ever further examined.
That government also came to office after years of speaking about accountability, integrity in public office, land ownership and broadening opportunities for Vincentians. Here is an opportunity to give those principles practical meaning. Indeed, the question of these 95 acres has already entered the present government’s discussion of land ownership. Housing Minister Andrew John publicly raised the contrast between such a large holding on Bequia and the difficulty faced by Vincentians trying to acquire comparatively tiny parcels.
And there remains a question which is as relevant to the present administration as it is to the last.
If 95 acres at Spring, Bequia represented a national interest in 2017, why should they represent any less of a national interest today?
Bequia has not grown another acre. Land has not become less scarce. The pressure upon Grenadine real estate has not disappeared, and the difficulty faced by ordinary Vincentians, including young Bequians, in acquiring land has certainly not diminished.
In my first article, I argued that the present government should have the property independently valued and consider acquiring it for planned national development. Nothing in the 2017 letter weakens that argument. On the contrary, we now know the language used by the government itself. It wanted to purchase/acquire the lands and declared a national interest in developing them.
There is, therefore, unfinished business at Spring Estate. The documentary trail should be followed and the questions answered. And if the national interest identified in 2017 remains compelling, as I believe it does, the present government should figure out what lawful options are still available to pursue it.
In the first piece I asked: “Who gets to own Bequia?”
The letter of Aug. 4, 2017, leaves us with another question, an even more important one:
Whatever happened to the national interest?
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