Baldwin Spencer is new Antigua PM

ST JOHN’S, Antigua: Longtime opposition leader Baldwin Spencer was sworn in as Prime Minister yesterday after a decisive victory in elections that ended the half-century dominance of a family political dynasty in Antigua and Barbuda. Spencer, a 55-year-old labour activist, took the oath of office at the governor general’s residence before hundreds of supporters and politicians. He said the Caribbean country’s government would get to work right away. “There is no honeymoon period in this business,” Spencer said. “We have to get down to work because we have a packed agenda.” His predecessor Lester Bird conceded defeat earlier yesterday. With all votes counted, preliminary results from Tuesday’s elections showed Spencer’s United Progressive Party with 12 of 17 parliamentary seats. Bird himself was unseated by Errol Cort, a former attorney general whom Bird fired in 2001.

“I think that the people have decided that it was a time for change,” Bird said. The Bird family has dominated politics here since the 1950s, when Bird’s father, the late Vere Bird Sr, was a revolutionary labour leader defying British colonisers to demand higher wages for cane cutters. The elder Bird led his country to independence in 1981 and was prime minister until retiring in 1994, when Lester Bird won elections. Results showed Bird garnered only 45 percent in his district, and his Antigua Labour Party came away with just four seats, down from its previous nine. Bird’s government had been badly damaged by scandals that in recent years have had workers remove boxes of “personal items” from his office over the weekend, drawing hundreds of protesters who accused him of carting away incriminating documents. Bird dismissed the charges as “absolutely crazy.”
As the results came out early yesterday, Spencer danced a traditional jig to a calypso beat. He called for healing and reconciliation, but also warned: “Crimes committed against the people must be punished.”

Excited islanders took to the streets early Wednesday, with car cavalcades honking horns and dodging revellers. “We have them now. Yes! Yes! Yes,” people chanted, repeating an opposition campaign slogan. The Electoral Commission estimated heavy turnout of 75-80 percent, though a precise figure had yet to be released. About 60 percent turned out for the last vote in 1999. One seat was undecided due to a tie on the smaller island of Barbuda; officials said a new vote would be held there in the coming weeks. Among opposition winners was Jacqui Quinn-Leandro, a 38-year-old consultant who becomes Antigua’s first woman to hold a House seat. Bird’s party had campaigned on a record of four percent growth in an economy based on sagging tourism and an offshore banking industry that critics say is corrupt.

While Antigua attracts upscale tourists, especially yachters, the opposition says few benefits reach ordinary people. Nearly half the 70,000 islanders still use pit latrines. Spencer’s party has pledged greater unemployment benefits and funding for school uniforms and lunches. The new leader named four ministers to his Cabinet, including lawyer Harold Lovell as foreign minister and Cort, who defeated Bird, as finance minister. Bird’s government repeatedly weathered scandals. In 2002, an inquiry into fraud in the national health insurance programme implicated 12 officials including two ministers. Seven people have been charged. In June, three legislators left Bird’s party to protest a decision not to hold a vote of confidence nor debate corruption allegations.

Even in earlier years there were scandals. In the late 1970s, Lester Bird was named in a US federal grand jury investigation as the moving force for Antigua being used to ship US artillery to South Africa’s apartheid government despite an arms embargo. Lester Bird’s brother, Vere Bird Jr, was accused of shipping Israeli arms to Colombia’s Medellin drug cartel in 1989. He lost his Cabinet post but never was prosecuted.