Big interview: Hew says mix of veterans and newcomers key to election success

The People’s Progressive Movement’s new leader, Joey Hew, comes under the spotlight as he outlines to Compass Media’s chief political correspondent Tammi Sulliman how he believes the party’s blend of experience and fresh blood can help it form the next government. He issues a clarion call for unity in the first of a series of interviews with the three party leaders.

Q: What can people expect with you at the helm of the PPM?

A: People have seen already what I’ve promised was to bring something different. We are as a party, after having celebrated our 20th anniversary some years ago, at a transition point. We had a transition of leadership, our fourth transition of leadership. … We have that continuity.

But at the same time, we’re very similar to where we were in 2013 — we are transitioning. In 2013, there were four incumbents in the PPM team that won that government. That was Mr. Kurt Tibbetts, Mr. Tony Eden, Mr. Moses Kirkconnell and Mr. Alden McLaughlin, now Sir Alden, and the rest were all freshmen, including myself. We are similarly back there now.

What we were told by the country was that they really enjoy and support the PPM because they know that they can trust us, they know that we are stable leadership, in particular during times like COVID. Our financial prudence is something that the country recognises, but what they wanted to see was a bit more diversity in the party. They wanted to see a little bit of a change, some younger blood, some diversity, and I think that is what we’re delivering here with the team that we have.

With the 13 candidates that we have, we have the right mix of age, we have the right balance of experience and new blood and we certainly have the gender balance with five very, very strong ladies on our team for the upcoming elections.

I have promised and I have engaged in developing a youth programme in the party to involve our younger people. Those that know me will have seen that, even prior to the campaign period, I started to make appearances in some of the not-so-traditional ways and engaging persons on social media, on podcasts and other things, and you can expect that to continue once elected and running the government.

Q: You would have heard there are some concerns about some of the new people you have brought on to the PPM … people like Mr. Kenneth Bryan … Mr. Dwayne Seymour, and there’s some questions about why the decision to bring on those two in particular.

A: The reality of it is politics, and some of my opponents may not realise this, but in politics and representation, it’s not just about your qualifications and what you can do as an accountant or as a lawyer or whatever — you also have to represent the people.

When we did our research, we understand clearly from our country that, listen, we have people like Dwayne ‘John John’ Seymour who the people have elected and will re-elect because he represents them.

Maybe his representation of his people may not be popular with others in the island. The fact is that he has to represent the people of Bodden Town East and the same goes for the Deputy Premier Kenneth Bryan.

He represents his people and, while he [Bryan] has proven and risen through the ranks to deputy premier in the executive, he is going to be re-elected because he represents his people and the country felt that we were kind of missing that grassroots representation and so, like I said, we have to strike that balance from the beginning.

It’s also important, and it would be naive for anyone to believe, that all the incumbents are going to be voted out this election. And so we had a look beforehand to say, ‘These are the people we’re going to work with’, and brought into the fold.

I have no intentions of going through the horse-trading that we saw after the last election. It was a stressful time for the entire country, not just for us that were involved in it, but it was the first time that I feared we would see violence in an election process in this country.

I truly feared it back then and I do not have any intentions of getting involved in that again and this is why I have put together a team that the entire country wants to see.

Were all of my constituents happy about that? Absolutely not. But I have to sit with them and explain to them that this is the reality of it. We need representation that represents everyone in the country.

We can’t talk about 3%, 5%, 6% when we’re talking about people because it affects everyone. Everyone matters and this is what we have to do when we represent our country and our people.

We have to represent everyone and, in fact, I think it is important that we focus even more on representing those who feel that they are left behind, who feel that they have been disenfranchised, that they have disappeared in all of this wonderful growth and development that we have had.

Q: Where does the PPM stand in regard to the school project in Cayman Brac?

A: We don’t have as much detail on that as we would like and we will obviously have to discuss it with the representatives there when the election is over.

It’s interesting — I don’t think there’d be an argument about the project if it was being done in Grand Cayman, the value of it, because we do know, everyone knows, that the cost of construction these days has made it very difficult to build anything, certainly within budget.

If you did a budget eight months ago to build a home and you are getting ready to build that home now with the recent tariffs and stuff that the US government have implemented on things like steel and other stuff … there are people who have received mortgages to build homes and found out they can’t build it right now for the value they could have built it six months, eight months, nine months ago.

We know that the Layman E. Scott Sr. High School has been deemed unfit and unhealthy and that something has to be done.

Q: The ReGen project – where do we go from here? What happens now?

We are back, I think, I don’t know, but it seems as if we are back at square one.

The idea of it becoming cost prohibitive escalated over the last year or two just because of inflation and the things that I spoke about earlier. I think if we were to look at it now, it would be inflated even further due to all these rising costs we see due to tariffs and the wars popping up around Europe and the world.

And so truly, we have been set back again another 12 years on this. When we started this process, we were saying it was 20 years overdue and now we’ve added on to that, so we’re decades overdue on this and we have some tough decisions to make.

Whatever we do, it will probably take years as far as putting out further requests for proposals.

Do we review it again and say is waste-to-energy in today’s modern world the solution for us? When we looked at that solution 12 years, 10 years, eight years ago, the experts said yes, it was. The experts said you need to burn every bit of garbage that you get to generate the sort of electricity or energy you need to make this work.

And then we had the setback with the auditor general’s report where the auditor general’s office had to go back and do a second report because so much information was left out of it. There seemed to have been some political shenanigans there where the auditor general was just handed a bundle and told, ‘Do a report on this’.

When we objected, it was found that there was a lot of information missing from that. All of the experts that we engaged, six or seven different experts at millions of dollars, they did not provide that information to the auditor general.

Now we are at a point where, in today’s costs, is it going to be feasible for us again? So do we look at recycling and mandatory recycling? And that’s not going to happen overnight either. That is a cultural change that we’re going to have to put in place.

But it certainly is one of the options. … I think it’s the quickest option we have now to reduce the amount of fill going into the landfill.

That landfill, they are saying has six years left in it. I heard that six years ago. I live less than a half a mile from there as the crow flies from there, so I see it growing on a daily basis. …

I am saying to you, if we were to have a fire similar to the one we had seven years ago, there will be loss of property.

I stayed up all night for that fire. I stood in the road … thank God, Sir Alden was up on the mound and I called him and said, ‘Sir Alden, the fire has jumped the road’. They said ‘no, no, it hasn’t. We have police down there; we have people watching’.

So I walked to the police car – it was empty. I walked down further to the next police car. It was empty. And I said there’s no one here and I’m telling you, and I filmed it. I said here are the embers jumping over the road into the mangroves next door. It has jumped the road.

The landfill has now grown by hundreds of yards towards the western boundary. It’s right up against the highway now. If there is a major fire there, there will be loss of property.

It will be a disaster … damage that we have not seen here. I continue to ask the question when we talk about value for money, where is the value on protecting our people? Where is the value on this environmental disaster we have of an unlined landfill that continues to grow and grow?

The first thing we will have to do is start recycling. … We have to find a way until we come up with a long-term plan; we have to reduce the amount of waste going into that landfill.

We also have to manage that landfill properly and give the Department of Environmental Health the budget to manage that landfill properly. It should be covered every day. There should be a layer of fill over that every day. … The covering needs to happen.