In what is being considered a firm announcement of a date for general elections in Montserrat, Premier Meade said, “I don’t understand why people don’t follow what is being said and believe what is being said. I do not believe in snap elections. I do not believe in taking away that choice from the people and as early as June last year, 2013, I indicated that Election Day, polling day will be the 12th September 2014.”
Indeed in a rare press conference on June 27, just under a year ago, the Premier had said: “I do not believe in snap elections, and calling elections to get the opposition off guard. I can say now that elections will either be the 5th or 12th of September, 2014, so that all who want to run can get themselves organised and prepared…”
The Premier when making his confirmation statement on ZJB radio might not have considered it an omen that that announcement was made three months of the day Baldwin Spencer surrendered his UPP government to Gaston Browne’s Antigua and Barbuda Labour Party. Three months’ time will tell!
In June last year, he was expanding having responded to a question that asked him if the word on the street that he was about to call elections had any truth. He said he does not comment on rumour. “Enough rumours have gone around on me and I won’t comment on those either,” he said.
He said further to his reiteration of an election date: “Part of it,” a phrase is now well known for, “is that every time you get fairly close to election people get a little election jittery and people change and therefore people start all sort of stories of destabilization, people falling out, etc.,” he said.
Five months later, he saw one of those he had referred to as colleagues leave his MCAP. “While I remain committed as a Parliamentarian, it is my belief that I can no longer effectively represent the people who have elected me to serve them, while being affiliated to your party,” the 51-year-old David Osborne wrote in a letter of resignation, dated November 16, 2013, to the party leader advising his resignation with immediate effect.
Osborne is now contesting the upcoming elections with the People’s Democratic Movement (PDM)
last year During the past month he has pronounced on the ongoing infrastructural development works which he said have created a significant number of jobs for many residents, as he referenced the current A1 road works, the Little Bay Development Project and the Lookout school expansion project among others, adding that more jobs were due to come on stream.
