I watched it happen to the Dame, Mary Eugenia Charles, Dominica’s only successful Prime Minister (PM) before Roosevelt Skerrit. The first person to be popularly elected PM after Independence, in 1980. Re-elected in 1985. Re-elected in 1990, with a one-seat majority. And although she served for five more years, until 1995, Dominica had already moved on.

Dominica is entering uncharted territory with the succession of sitting Prime Minister (PM) Roosevelt Skerrit. Skerrit, the Eastern Caribbean Island nation’s seventh PM, was first appointed in 2004, as a take-over: not popularly elected PM.

Losing the 2000 general election turned Dominica’s United Workers Party (UWP) into a single-issue advocacy organization: all about the election system.

If the period 2004-2025 in the Commonwealth of Dominica were to be named after the political figure who dominated it in politics, it would be called ‘The Skerrit Era.’

I call it ‘resilience,’ it is a buzzword that is closely associated with climate change. It means ‘able to take a hit and keep standing or even bounce back.’ I also associate it with elections.

A hard crime wave has rocked Saint Lucia. Gun deaths have skyrocketed in the small Eastern Caribbean Island State and Prime Minister Phillip J. Pierre seems to be addressing the crisis with great candor, resolve, and skill. He has commented frankly on political division on the Police Force, for example in ways that would raise eyebrows in neighboring countries.

In Antigua and Barbuda’s January 2023 general election, the ruling Antigua and Barbuda Labour Party of Prime Minister Gaston Browne eked out the narrowest win possible, a simple majority of 1 seat. Out of seventeen seats in the Lower House of Representatives, Browne’s Labour Party has nine to eight spread across the Opposition. 

Forty-four years after the Grenada Revolution, the biggest lesson for Eastern Caribbean political leaders is the following: a revolutionary government is not feasible.