Territorial At Large Representative Honourable Carvin Malone has lamented that one of the main hindrances to the BVI’s political advancement, and progress to independence, is the belief in the minds of Virgin Islanders that they cannot trust themselves to lead the territory and are in need of outside assistance at every turn.
Malone made the comment while speaking about the “One BVI Agenda” as a guest on the “Honestly Speaking” radio program with host Claude Skelton Cline.
“If you ask somebody tomorrow, what are their basic concerns in terms of governance of our people, by our people?… We have allowed the narrative to say you cannot trust any of us. So you have to be careful not to allow us to manage us. We have to depend on somebody else, and we have allowed that narrative”, he said.
Though Malone agreed when asked by Cline if he believed that the United Kingdom was at some level to blame for crafting and communicating this narrative of non-trustworthiness in the territory, he also stressed that the situation of the day is mostly the fault of Virgin Islanders themselves.
“We ourselves are to blame for a lot of this… What’s making us complicit is the fact that all of what our people demand… accountability, transparency and all of this good governance folks are concerned about and we have issues that we must correct but what I have said over and over… What we ourselves have been involved in does not give rise to the level of where our constitution has to be suspended, rejected – in part or in whole”, he said.
Malone said that the Constitution of the Virgin Islands was built by the Virgin Islands people and therefore, they are best fit to correct it and move it forward.
He added that a major task dealt to persons of authority is the breaking of the narrative of non-trustworthiness towards local leadership.