Political Analysis
More harm again
DIARIO Aruba
12/08/2007

ORANJESTAD (AAN): Tourism is the most important lifeblood of our economy and it is incredible that neither our governors nor our private sector have reacted as they must. Our Public Ministry has become a total farce and a laughing stock nationally and internationally.

However, the latest actions of the Public Ministry has done immense harm to the economy of Aruba. All of the American press and a few from other countries are in Aruba again and nothing can be done to turn a negative development into a positive one. On the contrary, advertisements say that still Aruba is not feeling the negative effects of the latest blunder of the Public Ministry, supported by a Minister of Justice who still doesn’t know where his face is.

The truth is that by the extraordinary efforts from the hotels themselves, tourism stopped going down compared to the recent past. But now that the verdicts of the judge-commissioner saying that the Public Ministry did not have any footing for the recent detention of the three young men, the negative effects will hit Aruba’s economy hard again. It is more than clear that the government does not have any plan to try to minimize these negative effects.

Again, our governors are with their arms crossed from the recent events without having any idea of what to do about it. Apparently the private sector doesn’t seem to be prepared either to do the maximum so that the actions of the government (Public Ministry) of Aruba in this case do not cause great harm again. Once again, we have to emphasize that it is impossible to understand how the government is not using the situation when so many foreign reporters are in Aruba to invite them to give the positive side of Aruba instead of letting them on their own and decide what they will write and talk about Aruba.

Aruba’s name is under great pressure again because of the impotence of our presiding minister who is traveling to India with people not being able to understand what he could be doing there that is more important than the name of our island.

His travels would be understandable if he left behind a team of capable and well-prepared people to deal with the difficult situation we have here. But this is not the case. There is no team which is in charge to tend to the bad propaganda that we will have in these days. This illustrates the mentality if the MEP government in what regards the future of our country.

The interest of the ministers is only to only look after their own interests and those of their family and friends. In all senses, we are confronted with the phenomenon of a total lack of interest in the important issues for the development of our economy on behalf of the current government. It can’t be this way that under these circumstances the presiding minister is on a snoepreisje [?] and given what’s happening he doesn’t show any interest in what he has to do as presiding minister.

Our minister of tourism hasn’t come out with something to avoid harm to our country either. On various occasions we brought forth that the minister of tourism cannot help because of tourism, he knows nothing. What he must be in charge of is a lack of general management based on the expertise of professionals.

And while it is known that tourism is not his specialty and given how much expertise there must be to look after tourism in a professional manner, he has to look for people who know of this matter. He hasn’t done this. Now we are looking at the consequences of the lack of good management. The negative effects of the bad management will be felt by our people who have already had great difficulty living under the pressure of the unjust measures that our government has taken.

This is the mentality of the government that the ministers don’t look at the problem because when things are going badly and they don’t have enough money for the government, they have no problems in taking measures to make the people pay for the bad management.

In these past days we are observing how tourism is doing but also we are observing again all sectors in our community are living in silence in fear that the government will get angry at them. Bad government from the people who can only look after themselves and do not take the interests of our people to heart.

[translated by Getagrip]