St Vincent’s Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves on Monday said it is now understood by him that in recent times, because he does not support selling passports, “he is an old fool”.
Gonsalves on Monday said lazy people who don’t understand many other things want to sell passports and sell citizenship. “That doesn’t require any particular intellect. You know, it’s being presented as almost like abstract nuclear physics beyond my grasp.”
“I don’t know. When you call me an old fool in that regard, the word old is used as a term of abuse. Well, I hope for their sake they get old. Because if you don’t get old, you die young. So be careful when you’re abusing. You can judge who is a fool and who isn’t afool. Invariably, a man who calls somebody else a fool is himself a fool.”
Gonsalves said the government has built a passport of high quality. Interestingly, among the biggest sellers of passports globally. The three best Caribbean passports are not for sale.
“Barbados, the Bahamas and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. And by the way. If I’m an old fool not to sell passports and sell citizenship, well, every single leader in Barbados in the last quarter century, they are fools too, some younger than others and a few in the Bahamas.”
“We invested millions of dollars making sure you have a high-quality passport. I don’t want to see it devalued. We are a mobile people. There are countries where a lot of Vincentians love to go: Europe, Canada, Britain and America. All of those countries disapprove of the practice of selling passports and citizenship”.
Gonsalves says the European Court just decided against Malta, which is a member of the European Union, striking down selling their so-called golden passports. “Strike it down. You know why they say they’re turning a passport into a commodity? You have to see how the world is going, and you have to be careful.”
“We have seen threats and sanctions of all kinds coming. We must not do anything that is irresponsible. We must not do anything, which is reckless. And it is an amazing thing. Because I say so. I’m not going to support the selling of passports and citizenship for that. I’m irresponsible. So the responsible thing would be to say, Please sell as many as you can as fast as you can.”
“Why should we depart? Why should the passport companies, those who want to sell the passport? Why do they want to spend so many millions of dollars in Saint Vincent to undermine our democracy? Ask yourself that. Why are they doing it? Why do they hire AI experts and AI technology people? Why are they paying? People who make commentaries on radio and pay their radio stations themselves. Why? Because they want this thing called the Saint Vincent and the Grenadines passport”.
Gonsalves said the programme is on borrowed time, thus all the recent commotion you’re seeing and hearing.
“Those who want to defend their breadfruit tree, they must make sure that what happened afterwards is not a guava season.”
