By Robert Andre Emmanuel
Reflecting on her recent exit from the opposition United Progressive Party (UPP), Dr Cleon Athill lamented the state of politics in Antigua and Barbuda as she expressed that politics should be about addressing the issues that affect the public.
“Politics is a tool for seeing the good in our community; politics is about how we use our resources; politics is about empowering people, so I will always be interested in politics,” Dr Athill told Observer media yesterday, after news broke that she resigned from the party last week.
The former UPP caretaker for the St Paul Constituency said in her resignation letter that her style of politics seemed to have been disliked by the party’s leadership which was alluded to have wanted combative personalities.
She added that the population has become so divided that defining “what is common” has become a challenging exercise.
“What my departure [and the way I have done it] has done is to create a wave of awareness right across Antigua and Barbuda, and the Caribbean, about the lack of a decent political culture; people are really waking up to think ‘how we can make it better?’.
“I think that will allow us to make a space that is more inclusive for women, and I firmly believe in more women going into the space,” she said.
Currently, St John’s Rural East Member of Parliament (MP) Maria Browne serves as the sole female representative in the Lower House of Parliament, and while there are seven female senators—only one is a member of the United Progressive Party.
In her resignation letter, Dr Athill also said that during the past three years as the caretaker, she had been faced with an existential dilemma/challenge that has led to her questioning herself on numerous occasions.
“I have seen … working so close in that space, how partisan politics doesn’t allow a country as small as Antigua and Barbuda to really cut through the issues that really affect us,” she said.
Dr Athill, who also spoke on Twin Island Media earlier this week, said that more people needed to step up to change what she described as ‘political toxicity’ in the country.
“I think we have reached a place where people need to begin to understand their power and instead of us believing that the drivers of change and development come from politicians, the people must take that back [otherwise] nothing is going to happen and they are going to be dumb and dotish because it suits them,” she expressed.
She added that while she attended public events put on by theUPP, she had stopped attending executive meetings in order to safeguard her own mental health.
She also said in the Twin Island Media interview that some people, despite calling for change, have shown no interest in being changemakers, mainly because they subscribe to the continuation of transactional politics.