Who Shot JR? … Antigua Version

Do y’all remember the American nighttime soap opera called Dallas and the famous 1980 cliffhanger titled “Who Shot JR?”  Well, that question obsessed television viewers until the new season started and the shootist was revealed. 

That’s how some of us are feeling at present as we wonder not only Who Shot Yida Zhang, but ponder why the authorities are so quiet on a matter that was misreported from the start.  

It's not every day that a “major developer” is shot in these investment-hungry islands.  So when something like this happens, we expect it to be big news, instead of the story petering out even before the usual nine-days talk.  

Just three months ago, the prime minister was bragging about the developer’s plans to inject another US$100 million – never mind the unrealized promise of a $1.2 billion investment – over the next year.  So one would think the investigation of this crime and the apprehension of the alleged criminal(s) would be the top priorities of a prime minister who is suddenly conscious of the shortcomings of the public-safety network and the judicial system.

One has to wonder whether, without this mysterious shooting, the prime minister would have voiced any criticism of the units of the National Security Council, at all.  After all, we heard no such outrage after the Nigel Christian murder trial from which two of the three of the four walked free. No talking to adult men like they were little boys when a young man was gunned down on a Sunday morning mere yards from both a church and a primary school. Not even when his once-upon-a-time brother Asot Michael was brutally murdered at home.

Now, with this new shooting, however, we are to accept that all and sundry in law-enforcement are irrelevant or underachieving.

So the ONDCP is useless, he says.  Well, we want to know why – although that agency had discovered there was an Interpol Red Notice on another Chinese “investor” – that man was being seriously considered as a buyer for a certain offshore bank. Who overruled the ONDCP?

And who has pressured the FSRC to allow a clearly insolvent financial institution to seek recapitalization while those most affected – the stranded depositors – remain in the dark about their accounts?  That money dead, too?  And what about the Court Order for incarceration should the defendant fail to compensate the plaintiff? Who leaned on the judge for leniency?

It is instructive that the prime minister had nothing to say about the actually defunct Integrity Commission and Office of the Information Commissioner?  Or is their non-functionality – effectively eliminating accountability and transparency among government ministers – simply part of the grand design?

What of the latest instance of police brutality: the tear-gassing of a mentally disturbed inmate of 1735?  I guess I missed the prime minister’s outrage and the attorney-general’s apology on that one.  But then, again, with the success of August 8, 2021, still fresh in their minds, the idea that might is right would not strike them as being wrong. 

So, let’s pivot to the claims of an underwater graveyard, then. You mean not even to prove the matter a hoax could the prime minister and minister of public safety insist on an investigation? Not even to placate the families of all the young men who have “disappeared” over the last few years? Did someone order the Police to dismiss the report – like they were ordered to stop investigating the Asian woman and the alleged real-estate fraud? 

What is the state of national security when the prime minister – who is now trashing and threatening a judge (he said judge, not magistrate), and urinating on the Bar Association and the OECS Court, and giving backchat to the Commonwealth Magistrates and Judges Association – made himself judge, jury, and pardoner when his wife’s ministry found itself embroiled in the Vehicle-gate Scandal?

Shootings and sexual assaults are appalling.  But so is white-collar crime.  Does the public not need to know its hard-earned tax dollars are safe and secure from persons breaking into auctioneers’ vehicles and from forged duty-free concession documents, too?  What about the decisions made by members of the Police Force who traffic in fake passports; by a magistrate who left the bench in disgrace; and by a prosecutor who was, himself, found guilty of professional misconduct?

Or did the prime minister not hear of these things? Did the attorney-general not tell him?

So, now Antigua and Barbuda finds itself, yet again, in the glare of a negative spotlight in not only the OECS but the entire Commonwealth, which, ironically, it has invited into its dirty house at the great expense of taxpayers.  

Here we are with the line-left-out minister of foreign affairs going to bat for a team from which he was excluded instead of maintaining a diplomatic silence. 

Here we are with the embarrassment of “Operation Restore Confidence” after the prime minister has told the police brass they’re no better at their job than recruits. Really?

So, let’s start here, then: Who shot Yida Zhang?