Anguilla, tranquility wrapped in blue. Anguilla, feeling is believing. Though both of these ‘nice sounding’ slogans will remain with us for a while, we can see where the tranquility that once engulfed our island is giving way to feelings of dismay, despair and desolation, as green and greed increasingly surround us.

The Anguilla that we all know is changing and changing rapidly. We know that change is inevitable but, at the same time, change is not always good. Sometimes changes can have detrimental effects on the indigenous people of any small island. Take, for example, Diego de Garcia. Heart Beat Radio recently aired the plight of the indigenous people of that country. In 2001, I also expressed my views on the Diego de Garcia situation in this same paper. I warned that if we were not vigilant, our fate would be like that of Diego de Garcia.

Unfortunately, we were not vigilant and as such we are now fighting a battle to hold on to our Anguilla. A battle, it seems, we are losing and losing quickly. When Flag Luxury was accepted by the Government of Anguilla, it was at a point where we were almost literally starving for some form of inflow of capital investment from the outside but after that, the Government of Anguilla went, for all intent and purposes, ‘crazy’. They approved three (3) projects by KOR group, the same group that runs properties such as Viceroy which employs what amounts to slave labour from India. (That’s another story).

The Government’s list of ‘major’ projects was distributed on Tuesday, June 5th, 2007. It included:

1. Flag Luxury Properties 750 rooms of which 525 remain in the hotel rental pool

2. KOR group-Barnes Bay 350 rooms, 262 remaining in the rental pool

3. KOR group-Sile Bay 825 rooms, 620 remaining in the rental pool

4. Altamer Expansion 370 rooms, 275 remaining in the rental pool
5. Frangipani expansion 75 rooms, all of which remain in the pool

6. KOR group-Meads Bay 350 rooms, 295 remaining in the rental pool

7. Gumbs Rendezvous expansion 450 rooms, 315 remaining in the rental pool

8. Conch Bay-Lake/Kentish family 730 rooms, 438 remaining in the rental pool

9. Gencom-Whitehall Cap Juluca 375 rooms, 225 remaining in the rental pool

10. Harrigan family-Medeariman 105 rooms, 80 remaining in the rental pool

This gives us a grand total of 4,380 rooms of which 3,110 will remain in the rental or hotel pool. This figure, however, does not include those rooms that already exist and Villas and other small properties that are being developed on the island by local and expats alike.

Staffing guidelines of existing 5-Star hotels show as follows:

Malliouhana: 55 rooms, 245 employees

Cap Juluca: 98 rooms, 400 employees

Cuisinart Resort: 93 rooms, 300 employees

Total rooms: 246 rooms with 945 employees.

Average: 3.84 employees per room.

Now, if we take the average and multiply it by the minimum number of rooms coming on stream we will get 11,942 workers needed for the new hotels. These are all conservative figures and they beg the questions, did the government really plan for all of this?

Did the government foresee the strain on the social services, the police service, the infrastructure? Did the ministers of government read these agreements before signing them?

The Anguilla that we once boasted about as being the, “ENVY OF THE CARIBBEAN”, is quickly becoming like any other destination in the Caribbean that has mass tourism. Our uniqueness is being lost and lost in a hurry. Our culture is decaying quickly. Soon, and very soon, the tourism slogan could quite possibly read, “ANGUILLA, PARADISE LOST!”

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