 Hello and welcome to special discussion with Prime Minister the Honourable Alan Chastney as we look back at the achievements and challenges of 2019. This is the final part in a three-hour discussion with the Prime Minister looking at various key areas as stated in his 2019-2020 budget presentation. And so we are now down to the areas of citizen safety and later on we'll be discussing what's happening with infrastructure. But for citizen safety for St. Lucien's many considered to be a very dismal year dark and gloomy looking at the rising violent crime and homicide I think we may have ended the year at number 51 for 2019. Very very troubling and you've indicated several times that for you it is a very warring situation. So as you look at what your strategy has been over the last year and looking forward do you believe that all was done to create that sort of buffer between the perpetrators of crime and the low-abiding citizens of St. Lucien? So this unfortunately is a recurrent theme in that I have to make reference to what we inherited. So we inherited a situation in which radar system was not working, forensic lab was shut, there was no DPP, in fact the office itself had been depleted significantly, courthouses were shut, no ammunition, policemen's morale was very very very low, lots of problems. So again to say I'm going to push a button overnight and all of a sudden things are going to get resolved wasn't going to happen. So when I first came in and I got my first briefing I was just I mean speechless and I immediately moved security up very high. It was a high on the priority list but I said we're crisis point at this at this point and one of the critical things was we a thousand case backlog in criminal cases. Let's put that in perspective that would take two judges almost three years and cost about 13 and a half million dollars to just deal with that backlog and every year we're adding more on to it because of the backlog so it takes almost somewhere between four and six years for a case to be able to be heard. Are you really going to have an effective justice system and a criminal security system if in fact a person is arrested is either put on remand and waits in jail for that period of time or is let out on bail until their case is being heard. So the cry that crime doesn't pay was changed to crime does pay and so there was no fear of being caught. Forensic lab in terms of getting the evidence wasn't there. Courthouses so when you did in fact want to get your case heard that courthouses were inadequate were constantly having to be closed because of problems massive massive problems. So we've systematically looked to rebuild the police system from everywhere so we've gotten now three or four of the marine boats working the radar system is working the forensic lab is back up in operation and I'm very excited fingerprinting and DNA testing are now fingerprinting is already operational by later this year the DNA testing will be huge where DPP's office has been replenished and is functioning we're now working on the communication system so for instance policemen didn't have any ways of communicating with other other than using their own cell phones we now have a proper VHF system that's in place that people can walk around with walkie talkies there's access in your vehicles training for policemen adding new policemen so we've added 40 new recruits into the police and we have now 42 policemen in the city that are there are helping the city police the city police right added new vehicles new motorbikes so there's a lot of work that's taking place what I've said is one thing I know in life is that wherever there's effort eventually there's going to be results and speaking about all that work so we now want to share with our viewers how all of that was able to unfold over the last year and so we go to our special production there looking back at some of the events in citizen safety for 2019 high on the agenda for government in 2019 was citizen safety with a focus on tackling the root causes of issues in that area to ensure more boots on the ground especially in identified crime hotspot areas 80 new police officers were sworn into the Royals in Lucia police force with an additional 42 to the city police unit in addition to ensuring a larger police presence government also addressed the issue of failing equipment and transportation hindrances with the purchase of new vehicles motorbikes and communication equipment operation of coast guard vessels and radar equipment were restored after an extended period of in operation those interventions now ensure quicker response times and better communication between officers and units recognizing that accidents and crimes can happen without witnesses government undertook the task of installing 180 cc tv cameras with over 525 to be installed at a cost of 5.8 million dollars to date crimes have been solved and vehicular accident disputes resolved using this technology after two years of the forensic lab being closed government undertook much needed refurbishment of the building at a cost of seven hundred thousand dollars the lab is now reopened and functional with 13 staff members and the latest industry standard equipment necessary for solving crimes using dna and other technology the lab has given us solutions to at least two cases one at marisol will be elderly lady and one from jiffot young lady called sabi um so we have the forensic and that and it was found out that those individuals were the ones who committed the crime and this is the way we have to go forensic evidence is going to be the way forward we we can't rely on eyewitnesses or persons to come forward because as a small society we don't have the capacity for witness protection we'll just a small window of opportunity there so we have to rely rely on the forensic intent on clearing out the backlog of cases and ensuring swift adjust the government has fortified the office of the dpp by providing much needed resources additionally the number of magistrates and judges have been increased to ensure criminal and civil matters are brought to a close as quickly as possible community afterschool programs continued throughout 2019 in communities such as masha uge belvi moshi babano jackmel souffle and foreshaw to name a few this program keeps young persons meaningfully engaged in sports music dance and art the program also entails mandatory life and social skills training all helping to serve as a deterrent to the streets students are also served with meals during that time provided by the government the community afterschool program helps those young persons with self-development as well as building meaningful relationships and camaraderie programs such as this aim to tackle crime at the root so as we saw there we we looked at in the video we saw that the courts united we're opening up the naira court we spoke about the cctv which is massive investment for the government and most importantly we saw the recruits which we spoke about so beefing up the police and wanting as well to for more boots on the ground for the government as you begin to examine how it is that you could really tackle and because your aim is for 45 percent reduction of serious crimes by the end of 2022 and so some people looking back at 2019 would believe that we're just not on targets I think you know we're we're disappointed in the numbers but the fact is the effort is there and we're starting to see people starting to believe in the system so policemen had been given promises of new vehicles forever policemen had been given promises that we'd be fixing up their premises forever policemen were still suffering from the impacts situation and the lack of proper training and the equipment to be able to do their job so I think that everybody's starting to get the message that my government is committed and that when we make a promise to them that we're going to deliver on that promise we now meet on a weekly basis we've been doing that for almost over a year every single Monday before cabinet the minister of security the attorney general the delivery unit and senior members of the police force we meet and we go through the numbers so we're measuring 10 different serious levels of crime robbery burglaries car theft homicides a bunch of them that we look at and we're measuring them on a week by week basis trends as well as on a per annual basis and then compared to where we want the numbers to be able to get to uh so people now are getting custom that they have to answer to these ideas but as much as I'm putting those systems in there are some other projects that we're working on we're equally as important cause of the crime in the first place so one if you look at the number of homicides that happened late in the year the vast majority of them were what brothers fighting with brothers cousins fighting with cousins friends fighting with each other yeah stabbing each other shooting each other simply because they couldn't control their tempers all right big problem police can't stop that that's us as a society and people recognizing that things are building up and try to separate people because once somebody's life is lost they're lost they can't bring them back and so this is a societal problem that we have to be able to resolve so then the thinking how we think about crime when we look at personal responsibility uh where does each individual fit into the bigger picture of fighting crime you're saying that we need to have a sort of shift in the mindset of how the nation views all of those factors that's on homicide so we see if you take gang of violence as well as and combine it now with um uh personal conflict that makes up the vast majority of the homicides we've had the bigger one I'm concerned about really is robberies burglaries and car theft and I think that what happens it affects a lot of people and it chains their mindset in terms of what the overall safety and the capacity of the police to actually carry out a proper investigation so look I'm not telling any tales behind school I think that most of us who've been in that I have been robbed in the past policemen came in I have questioned how I see they're collecting the forensics the fingerprinting and and the DNA samples and how they inform me in terms of what they're doing it's not really left me with a warm fuzzy feeling that these crimes are going to be resolved so by improving the forensic lab now creating our own crime unit a dedicated crime unit that are actually the ones collecting this evidence um and the building of a database because to be fair if there isn't anything to match it up against then we're really in the losing battle correct and unfortunately I'm the one who was involved in that discussion I remember when we opened the forensic lab the first time and I said why you don't have any information in why don't we use the fingerprints from the ID cards now solutions have to think about that and have a real discussion about that I for one would like my fingerprint to be in it because if there's a crime I want to know that I'm not the one who committed the crime and if in fact it helps resolve crime and keeps me safer that's a positive thing but we have to weigh that up based everybody's civil rights and and those that's the discussion that will take place but I genuinely believe that we should be able to have access to the fingerprinting off ID cards we're not doing it right now but that's a discussion that needs to be able to take this here 100 correct I think getting the DNA lab here so for instance a lot of people who are having sex with younger girls we're now going to be able to provide the evidence as to whether they're doing that or not we've spoken to the policeman of traffic I think that solutions when they start seeing that we're dealing with some of the smaller crimes on a more consistent basis it builds confidence and starts changing people's overall attitude you know speeding cars that aren't really suitable to be on the road yeah all these are very very important things in terms of maintain loitering illegal activities which we just let go so who's making the decision so what somebody's acting of the judge every time to determine well this person can get away with it and this other person cannot we have to be consistent in terms of how we're going to be enforcing so there's a general attitudinal change that needs to take place and I think that we're starting to get the buy-in now of the police force to be able to do that I mean I'm I'm committed to this police force I absolutely feel for them in terms of what they've had to do and I was just saying in a meeting today you go to a police station the tiles are missing the drain is clogged there's no hot water the toilet seat is missing there's not proper towels the washer and dryer are not working the mattress hasn't been replaced in a long time the kitchen is a mess the furniture is falling apart and they've not walked off the job I'm gonna I would rather talk about the good things that these guys have done than everybody wants to focus on all the negative things and so my government has said let me help and that's where I'm really proud of the work that my wife is doing in terms of reinforcing in the policeman's mind that we want to celebrate them and that's why every year at the police ball we celebrate people who have retired and recognize the policemen police officers that are achieving great things and and to say to them we do care we do recognize what you're doing to be able to get the insurance and we're looking at duty-free vehicles for policemen because if a policeman is going to be on duty should he really have to be traveling in uniform on a public bus right but again these are things that have been outstanding for the longest amount of time and we're now getting through all of them so building the morale of the police force would result in better protection of the nation it's one of the things and that's what I'm saying to you it's there's not one thing by itself it's a multitude of programs and efforts that are being made in initiatives in order to strengthen our police force border control okay the computer terminals that you see in immigration there's nothing in them nothing in them no for years the company that provided the software went bankrupt never been replaced you know a simple thing that when I went into the immigration office at the airport and it was just piles of immigration cards and you could smell the ink and they had rats and it was horrible even as prime minister it took me six months to eventually get that to be moved there's just a malaise generally speaking and people are just become so despondent because the systems weren't working and it was everywhere Victoria hospital police stations in your schools on the roads government buildings so this attitudinal change that needed to take place and that's why I'm saying this Christmas was the first time I've seen in a long time people's confidence and hope was being restored and you can see people going out with smiles on their face I went to Asso square I went around the island I went into the shops and saw how packed it was and you can see that vibrancy that was starting to come back and I think you believe that they felt safe not just they felt safe people were just feeling better about the direction this country was going in and then you can see that they're becoming more comfortable with that and as more and more of the programs that we have been outlining that we're outlining today are starting to manifest themselves that will continue in my mind to contribute confidence it's the same thing with the police some of them are going to run out of excuses you have the communication systems we have the ability to collect the intelligence we knew who they were okay we're getting advanced notice so in fact if you're not doing your job then there must be a different reason and so holding them accountable would be far easier that's what I'm hearing you're saying one of the other pillars or what you call them 12 game changers within the citizen safety when your budget address you spoke very passionately about the rehabilitation and so that we can cut back on repeat offenders and so forth uh how far a scope of a program you're expecting this to be is something confined solely to the bodily correction of facility or you expect it to be something broader across the spectrum for uh low low enforcement so we're examining a multitude of different options so first of all increasing the number of social workers we have 12 we've added another three want to get to 30 yeah um and also to give them the resources so that again um potential uh I don't want to call them criminals okay but potential yes at risk individuals that we can address it early enough that they don't choose that path first time youth offenders even if it's a criminal case why don't we use technology they get convicted they get an ankle bracelet instead of me putting them in borderlay which I call linkedin meaning that they're developing now a new rolodex of contacts they're getting a free education in crime and they get a stigma associated to them and that it makes it very difficult for them to choose any other career other than crime um that they're now reporting to a counselor not even a parole officer a counselor who's now working with them to be able to get a proper job when they can start now going down a different road the public is safe because they have um this thing a young person now is not condemned to a life of crime and they're given a new opportunity and if they're in fact successful what they get now is they come off of the ankle bracelet and they now have to just report like on a parole basis do we even know how much it cost to maintain um a prisoner a borderlay so actually not having a borderlay or a minimized borderlay means with the same amount of money we might be able to implement a system like that so creating kind of a halfway system where they're still having to give up some of their rights because they have an ankle bracelet on them but at the same time they're being reintegrated and given a second chance in our society and again this is why I say as a small island what may apply as a good program in bigger countries doesn't necessarily work here so if I was in America and I got caught in Miami I can go to Orlando I can go to Jacksonville I can go to Georgia I can go to across the country I can go to Chicago yes I have a record but people don't know me where are you going to go in San Lucia right so we have to have a more compassionate country and address what the root cause of these problems are in the first place you're never going to be able to eliminate it entirely but malicious crimes and people who are deliberately threatening people's lives stealing people's assets we must do everything we can to rehabilitate if we cannot then that's where the traditional system will come in but these are the kinds of discussions that we're having in terms of looking at a medium-term and a long-term solution to the problems we have you know it's funny because I once had a conversation with a correct police officer and he asked me a question and said that in all of the years that we've had police in in San Lucia boots on the ground and all of those things police men come and go generation after generation in the hot spots we consider to be the crime hot spots what has changed and I had to pause and really think and he said everything remains the same it's just that you have a revolving door of police officers policing these hot spots and the social economic and the people but the socioeconomic status remains and so I had to really give that some thought as you spoke about changing mindsets in the environment that that came to mind that in those areas that's the constant the socioeconomic status of these hot spot areas the after-school program that's another thing that the government is passionate about being able again to create that intervention to engage young people are we broadening the scope again of this program we are it started off basically and it really is at the school at the schools itself as the school facilities and I mean we learned our very you know should have probably been more obvious we had to include food and so providing a meal for the kids went a very long way in encouraging participation in the program but this club system that we're proposing and building the facilities to be able to do that so so if you have a club and the club can have drama it can have sports in it you have primary level and secondary level and you have what we call senior leagues yeah so a club can have a multitude of different programs and it's in your community right and it's by providing resources so what we're saying is the money that currently goes into the lottery so we're basically what we're doing is taking and dividing the lottery taking the regulatory part of what the lottery does which is to provide the oversight of gaming and putting that into the gaming authority and now creating a new youth and sports authority and so that entity now will be putting together the programs so you can have different drama programs different film programs you can have dance programs all throughout the country after school so I can come home after school into my community I can go to dance class I can then go to football class yeah all in my same community we know that when people participate in these kinds of activities it helps them so it teaches interaction it teaches competition to become successful you must become disciplined to create the that desire to become successful is competition so the more competition there is and the higher the level of competition the more disciplined and the more work you have to be able to do and you build self esteem there and you build self esteem some will be concerned about the unattached youth so not at school young out of school in the community does that also encapsulate these individuals yeah so we have a special program for that so what happens is that we've talked about creating a social net is how we describe it so currently in the system people for the most part governments for the most part have believed that you can help vulnerable people through taxation I'm not going to put that on baby food or some of these products as if somehow you're going to help a poor person or we're subsidizing the cost of rice flour and sugar we're not only subsidizing it for the vulnerable person but we're subsidizing it for everybody else when we reduce the VAT on on we reducing it for everybody so we're saying we don't think that that's the best way so we're saying let us use technology where everybody's going to become registered they're going to have their insurance card they're going to have their proper ID card we're now going to keep track of who's working who's not working and what their status is by decentralizing government into the local government between elderly health care mental wellness and also sports as well as our social programs to maintain who these people are so your poverty list right now is not really a poverty list not everybody who deserves and deserves to be on the poverty list is poverty list is driven by what how much money has been put into the budget and so therefore the people who are on are happy people who are not on they tell you why is my government's not in government and this and that and and then the minister is getting involved because they're clearly being getting pressured by their constituents we said we have to create a system in which once you are deserving of it that you get it so some of these single mothers who don't have jobs don't have the capacity to get jobs with multiple kids right we need to be able to provide free education free bus transportation free food make sure that kids have more than one pair of shoes and also have their uniforms and have their schoolbooks or their e-book make sure they're getting a knock related all these things the state must become the father but the equally there are single fathers with multiple children right correct but and once they are deserving right and that they don't have the capacity to do it for themselves we have to be able to support that part of that is also providing them with the clothing and the ability to go these sports programs so this is why we're saying a minimum standard for everybody else it is when kids are discriminated against when all of a sudden they're kids who have and they have kids who have not that these kids have to psychologically grow up not feeling the same right and when I spoke to um some of the social workers some of these boys nobody's ever hugged them nobody said I love you who's going to their games with them we need that I can't imagine a day going by without me telling my son I love him can't imagine not hugging them yeah and sometimes I see myself like he pretends like he doesn't want it you know darn well that he does and this is why I say that to all of us as solutions we see the problem every day in our neighborhoods let's go back to the days when we used to help each other out because you ignore that problem that problem is going to come back and at some point it may confront you right we must have this love and this compassion for each other we must learn to give and there's some solutions who I just admire because they give above and beyond what they're supposed to but not all of us do and and we almost find a way to do that so the security problem is intertwined with a whole bunch of things it's not going to get resolved with any one no one thing but I want to make it very clear that we have not picked any one thing to solve the problem every aspect of it we're injecting money injecting resources and continuing to monitor it and that's why I say to you I am confident right I can't tell you when but I am confident that those efforts will pay off people will see it and the combination of everything that we're going to do is going to resolve this crime problem and it's a good time for us to take a break and when we come back we'll be focusing on infrastructure lots of big exciting prospects there for Saint Lucian stay with us see you on the other side of the break see it reported if you see me please help me call the TIP hotline and welcome back to our discussion with Prime Minister the Honourable Alan Chastney as we look back at the year 2019 infrastructure Prime Minister and I see you already give that smile because again referring to the article for consultation for Saint Lucia I said that the projects that the government has in the pipelines capital projects certainly it would be a great jump start for the economy the expectation is that it is going to substantially boost growth between 2020 and 2022 so the focus for your government in the last financial year the rehabilitation of the millennium highway and the west coast road there's a reconstruction or rehabilitation of secondary roads and collector roads feeder roads and the redevelopment and expansion of the Hironora international airport we know that deserves a special attention so we're going to give it a do but the rehabilitation for the millennium highway that is I think a lot of people are in great anticipation because it's really that's become a great sort of connecting road between castries and the southern part of the island where are we at with that because some people want to be able to see that the tractors are going out and doing things you know with immediacy is it happening yeah so the the money's the funding for that project is coming from the diffid fund so when David Cameron was prime minister he committed something like 330 million pounds to caracom of which Saint Lucia's portion was somewhere between 30 and 40 million pounds the former government had allocated that money towards the north south highway we just felt that that was not even going to be sufficient and the time to spend that money would not have been able to we would not have been able to fulfill it we felt that the millennium highway and we felt the west coast road in particular were in dire need of reinforcement and so we've allocated the money so the project is managed by cdb and has to go through first of all a test which had passed to being qualified then it had to get a bidding process to find a designer so that was done last year the designer came on board the designer has completed the designs now of the project we've gotten them to agree to break the project into three parts the millennium highway and ancillary being the first part of sorry the ancillary bridge being the first part and the board of cdb is meeting or has met and hopefully approved the next phase which we'll be now putting it out to bid so once it goes out to bid that takes about anywhere between two and three months depending on how everything goes so work should be commencing in march or april of this year on that project the millennium highway which i call the roller coaster because i you know i'm surprised more people have not had accidents on that road so we're very excited that that's going to take place following on the heels of that was the shock bridge the sorry the cul-de-sac bridge which is being done by jaika the japanese sadly you know that was a project that was supposed to start much earlier when it was put out to bid the contractors did not come up with the prices that everybody had thought that they would have and so it had to go back out to bid again and this time reduce the the project to just being the the the bridge itself my understanding is that a japanese company has been identified they have visited here and we're hoping to hear that that the japanese government has approved now for that project to be able to to commence so that project has been scaled down the ravine plus a portion of it has been taken out and we're looking for other resources to do that bridge that's such a critical bridge that we have to be able to do um so i'm very excited about getting that road done in addition to the millennium highway and the ancillary bridge will also be labised there's a huge component of of strengthening of for for resilience so slope stabilization safety in terms of barriers all along the high of the road going down to sufer and you know that's obviously a very important road for us from a tourism perspective and then also for the livelihood of the people who live in ancillary and and canaries and also in sufer all right so the reconstruction for our secondary roads the collector roads uh we now have what is deemed to be the largest ever in the history of sinusha for road rehabilitation and funded by the government of the republic of china taiwan some 42 million dollars if memory serves me correct uh portions of that program i think have sort of unfolded and the pocket areas of communities when can we expect to see a really large scale of the project unfolded so it's already started i'm casin bar road um has been done um the uh uh forest air road has been completed um and some other roads in um babbino have been done uh we're piaz um saltibus road um the piaz is hopefully going to start just now uh there are a lot of roads back roads in the grozolet and castries north constituencies um so there are roads all throughout sinusha at length and breadth of sinusha in my own constituency the blasha road and the spring road the denry um town roads uh there's roads in in miku north that are going to be done so all throughout the length and breadth of this country um they're going to be started so we have been uh had agreed with the taiwanese to borrow approximately um 250 million u.s dollars 100 million dollars went towards the airport uh eight million went four million went to um housing four million u.s went to ministry of education and 40 42 million is going into into the road redevelopment because of the loan and the structure of the loan we have a five-year moratorium so we actually will be doing an additional um 10 or 12 million u.s dollars work of roads primarily in the grozolet and also um castries area uh so all those road works are starting right now uh the designs have been completed contract i mean contract subcontractors have been identified my understanding is all they're doing is finalizing the negotiation between oecc and themselves um to be able to proceed with the with that work program in addition to that we're doing the west coast road as well as the millennium highway the bridges that we're going to be doing and then we're also doing feeder roads so we have about 50 million ec dollars in helping uh rebuild and um and re-strengthen and and re redevelop feed roads so uh for my our farmers this is critical and with the emphasis that we're doing on bananas as well as in the diversification programs very very very important and and sadly in all of these things we're not getting to do everything that we need to do so you know in terms of feeder roads there should be about 80 million dollars or more of work to be done uh the roads that we're doing with the the taiwanese only represents one third of the total roads in selusia uh so but this is a beginning uh it's going to be a significant impact on selusia and i have to say to everybody that this does not include any new roads this is just rehabilitating the existing roads and that's why i'm saying is that the deterioration of the infrastructure of this country was just going unabated not enough money was being spent over the years unmentaining the existing roads and even after a period of time even if you're maintaining a road you're going to have to rehabilitate it um the other big project i'm sure you're going to bring up is uh the north south highway yes critical critical road so there was a feasibility that was done by cdb we are in discussions with the americans the canadians and with the taiwanese to look at the final putting in a final design for those for that road and coming up with a final costing but preliminary costs are around 300 million us dollars to be able to develop that road uh we have set aside 28 dollars off of the airport tax in order to be able to fund that road so as soon as we have been able to finalize everything we will assign 28 dollars to be able to do that once we've completed the airport and we think that if we see an increase in arrivals in excess of 500 000 that we can actually pay off the loan for the airport quicker and then now assign that money to be able to help us to complete that highway but i want to say that that probably is one of the most significant infrastructure projects that we would have to take this is the one project that really takes solution to the next level so when you go to barbados as an example think of barbados without the abc highway and that's exactly where we are and those people who are traveling between castries and grows away know exactly what i'm talking about how much of the traffic that wants to go up north doesn't need to come through castries how much of the land on the east coast we can't access because there's not a proper road there so if in fact now you have the container port in cul-de-sac you now have a proper millenium highway that's going to continue to denry with a tunnel through the bar de lille and then you have two industrial highways that are going north and south at that point that even the distribution of cargo and in commercial traffic now can go on that major highway and i think it's going to make a significant difference in the growth potential of solution all right you're giving yourself a timeline and within which this should be completed we would like we would like before our term completed this time to have secured the financing and finalized the designing if in fact we could start that would be a bonus but right now given the constraints we have because we don't have a limitless supply of monies we were able to create some space for ourselves by introducing the airport tax and by putting in the gas tax so that therefore these claims and allegations that the country is rudderless and that we have problems financially is not true we are seeing an improvement in tax collections which are continuing to pay to recurrent and recurrent expenditure but these new projects that we're bringing in have their own dedicated revenue streams and certainly every major project that we're bringing in we're trying to have some form of dedicated revenue stream and so the goal is not to burden the taxpayer not increase the national the tax the taxpayer is paying right because whether it's through a gas tax whether it's through an airport tax i mean the majority of the airport tax is being paid for by the by the tourists and all these things help now improve our overall our tourism product but there are people who try not to burden them by having to take loans to the government having to take it's not the burden it's not to burden the state um in the sense that we are running deficits so the the the most worrisome number that solutions should have been aware of under the previous government regime was the fact that we were spending 170 million ec dollars a year on interest in 2003 that number was 33 million right that's a lot of money to be paying in interest and so we need to be mindful of that and what we've been able to do is not allow that number to grow we've been able to do that by reducing the amount of short-term treasury bills we have by not borrowing as much money as we had before that's going to have to come out of the recurrent expenses all that 170 million it's coming out of the recurrent expenditure so the interest and the principal on these new loans are being paid for by these dedicated taxes the redevelopment of the hero nor international airport we did have an announcement uh in the midway through 2019 that the sort of first phase was beginning with that project some people would believe that false start um not really i mean you and i had this discussion um a while back when a project begins is not when you see the groundbreaking uh taking place there's so many things that have to go on behind the scenes so this is a very big project um a tremendous amount of soil testing uh eis uh designs all had to be done and in the midst of it we've been negotiation with the united states government to be able to have what we call a pre-clearance facility so it means that u.s passengers um leaving solution would actually clear u.s customs and emigration here and so there had to be adjustments in the design that we were going to be able to make we have been in negotiations with the taiwanese the oe cc um in terms of finalizing the loan we had to organize the other forms of the loan so the hundred million dollars from the taiwanese was not going to complete the project but the loan that we got from the taiwanese with the five-year moratorium gives us the ability to borrow additional money which we did so we borrowed 75 million dollars from a consortium of banks we've been to parliament twice with that particular bill and we're now just finalizing that term agreement so we can't start the heavy work until all of the loan agreements have been passed my understanding is is the final approvals are going to the uh uh slasper board on friday but meanwhile all the plans have been completed the preliminary uh master plan has been approved by planning the infrastructure for the uh the foundation which is going to require almost 2000 piles because the soil is very soft there all that has been completed and my my understanding is that they're very far advanced with their negotiations with the subcontractors in terms of allowing that project to proceed so we're expecting very shortly what people are expecting to see which is the physical part of it would have happened but we've been collecting the money a lot of laws have had to be changed a lot of things had to be done in order to be able to accommodate this project but i'm very excited as to the progress we've made it's a very difficult project and i really want to commend slasper and i want to again thank the government of taiwan for extending their hand and providing us with this concessional loan wonderful now as we are beginning to wrap up our discussion prime minister the unemployment rates and of course that will fall in line with all of those spending projects that we have because people of anticipation of jobs we're announcing that there's a fall from 25 percent to 17 percent the youth unemployment is also down 10 percent so we are from the 44 percent we're now at 34 percent and i do hear you say not necessarily comforting yeah again these are all things that tell us that we're moving in the right direction when you have even 17 percent of your population unemployed that's distressing you know but relative to where we came from it's it's a it's a substantial improvement and those numbers were numbers that we got in september so i have to imagine that we should be getting the next quarter numbers i i generally believe that those numbers are going to come down and certainly with the major project starting i think that our promise of getting to 15 percent in our first term that we're actually going to beat that that number and beat it quite significantly so unemployment is an important measure and as we see more people becoming employed and more people have money in their pockets and people start spending that money like we saw over the christmas period then it becomes effective meaning that more and more people now will start being employed and businesses hopefully continue to be confident moving forward before we get to your expectations for 2020 i want to give you some time to talk about your tenure as the chairman of the caribbean community caracom which has come to an end because we now have prime minister mia marty of barbados who has now assumed the chairmanship your uh experience detailed that for us if you can or encapsulate for us what that experience was like at a critical time because we did have the heads of government conference here lots of issues were on the table very pressing issues climate change being one of the the primary things as well as getting the caracom as an organization to function in such a way that it is more meaningful and delivers more meaningfully to caracom nationals um so look i'm very appreciative of the opportunity you've been chairman as i said to uh the chairmanship really means that you're the watch the night watchman because there's not really a lot that you're going to be able to accomplish in six months so it's whatever the critical issues that that come up it's your turn to be on night watchman so you're the first line of response to any of these issues so the situation in Haiti we had a very tense situation in Guyana that we were working through we had elections in dominica which required the rss forces to be able to go in and be able to help uh and then the continued work program that we have the blacklisting with the with uh some of the countries uh the climate change as you indicated was a real a real topic um csm e because that was a hot topic of discussion um when when we were here uh the improvements of a regional security system so lots of things to be able to keep your your your pulse on and correspondent banking correspondent yeah we had a we had a very important meeting in in uh washington dc i want to thank prime minister gaston brown um who leads that that segment uh we had also the opportunity of meeting with um prime minister trudeau uh late in the year i also had the opportunity of meeting prime minister boris johnson very late in the year and on both cases using the opportunity to push forward um the caracom initiative i know that we've been trying for some time to be able to get prime minister trudeau to come to a caracom heads of government meeting i'm really hopeful that he will come to the meeting in barbados um in in in february so i just want to say that you know with caracom it it doesn't stop there's a continual agenda that we have to be able to follow my government's position on regional organizations is they must achieve at least uh one of two things if not both one is to improve the quality of governance in our country so means that the quality of my health care the quality of my education system the quality of my security system ought to be enhanced by regional participation secondly that the cost of governance should come down so by sharing some of these things that the cost for me should come down but ideally what you want is both you want to see a reduction in cost and an improvement in the overall quality and i'm not so sure we're always getting that and i think that uh honestly that uh a lot of people have said this i'm not the first that the caracom is in in need of some structure reform itself sadly i was not able to make it to giana to meet with the staff and to be able to interact with them i was not able to spend any time looking at those structures because we were overwhelmed with both situations in silocia and also other issues within caracom haiti being a very big one again you know very early we were supposed to have a trip to haiti unfortunately things got much worse they've seemed to have settled down a little bit but that continues to remain a hot topic for for for us to be able to discuss although it's far from the public mind but as we say hello to 2020 mr prime minister and our remaining moments want to give you an opportunity to talk about your own expectations for yourself the government and where you see saint lucha go in within this new year we have 18 months left before elections i'm excited at the prospects because we've put a lot of hard work in i'm expecting that a lot of the the the the the results of that hard work will become visible this year both from an infrastructural perspective because people will actually physically see work taking place from a policy perspective our headquarters act the work that we're doing with the europeans in terms of making our financial sector secure that ought to be coming into fruition i i think that we're going to continue to see our tourism grow i'm very excited about the prospects of of coming with a major project with the cruise industry particularly for castries redevelopment as well as putting a port and view for it i think a a cruise ship port and view for it at a home port in particular are going to it's going to transform the south not just few fort but all the way to sufer and up to denry i'm excited about the work that's taking place in our culture i'm very excited about the work that's taking place in education i'm very pumped about the new recording studio and broadcasting unit that's going to be put at the old san lucia radio station and to be integrated into sir arthur lewis we've put a lot of work into thinking what we're going to do at sir arthur lewis so the new principle and where he comes from and what he's doing is exciting so there's a lot i'm looking forward to but it means that we just we need to remain extremely focused very easy for people because it's 18 months to start thinking about elections so my attitude is is that we're keeping our foot on the accelerator very hard this year and really i'd like to get to a point where maybe we can get into fixed dates for elections as well as spending less on elections i mean i see some countries our neighbor in the north america seems to be in perpetual election mode and the amount of money they spend whereas when i was i saw the canadian elections you wouldn't even know it it came and went i think england also has a very good system in terms of restriction how much advertising and everything else that can be done a lot more controls so i think it's important that people exercise their democratic rights but i think as a small country the amount of time that is attributed to it we have to be very we have to be very cautious i have ignored my party politically in many ways you know when i was in opposition it afforded me the opportunity to spend substantially more time in my constituency branches and dealing with the party and then you know you have a chairman of a party and you have a political leader of a party and it really is to continue to allow that to be nurtured so i think that now that we've been able to accomplish what we have from a government and it really required my full-time attention my family and my political party both i believe have suffered from the amount of time that i've had to focus on turning this thing around with with with the country i'm not so sure i could ever describe to people what we were confronted and how difficult it has been to achieve what we had to achieve the meetings with the real bank and the imf to build up their level of confidence to be able to attract investors i mean this year huge task ahead we have 700 million dollars of bonds that come due that we have to roll over and so it's about keeping the confidence of those people letting them understand and hopefully appreciate that we're on the right track so again in the sake of politics sometimes when we are prepared to demean the brand in the name of st lucha in the name of politics we sometimes forget how much damage that we're doing but unfortunately that's not just unique to st lucha that's unique everywhere and so as a government we have to continuously put ourselves in a position to be able to overcome that and let people know that they are things that are taking place that are very positive that we are a country that follows the rule of law and that we believe that the strategy we have is a very effective one so that's why when you hear about the reduction in unemployment what's happening to the debt to gdp what's happening with some of the the other projects these are important milestones in terms of continuing to build and keep people's confidence but i don't want solutions ever to believe for one minute that we as a government believe that that's what the final road is going to be not until all solutions and i do mean all solutions are taking care of in this country and are living what we consider to be a decent a decent living will we ever stop and it may not happen and be completed by time my term of office completes but i'm hoping that like many of the other leaders be for me particularly sir john that i would have made a con a significant contribution towards achieving that and solutions will be well on their way to live in their best life ever thank you so much prime minister the honorable adam chastney we know it has been a very busy time for you taking the time of the schedule to be able to sit with us and give us a further insight into what it is the government of sinusha has been doing in the last year because that brings us to the end of our special production the year in review for 2019 i've been your host mr joseph see you next time