Dr Tim Harris, Your recent attempt to discredit the Special Sustainability Zone (SSZ) confirms a troubling pattern that defined your years in office: you attack visionary development not because it is flawed, but because you do not understand it. You are trying to turn the SSZ into a source of fear among the people, yet you have offered no credible economic analysis, no alternative model, and no supporting facts. What you are offering is noise, not leadership.
Before criticising a policy, a responsible person would conduct research, consult experts, study global precedents, and speak from informed judgment. You have done none of these things. Instead, you are fuelling anxiety based on speculation. You are not educating the public, you are misleading them.
In doing so, you are attempting to distort the public’s perception through speculation rather than substance. Responsible leaders research before they speak. You, however, have chosen to speak loudly without doing the intellectual work required to defend your position. What you are producing is not guidance, it is confusion. What you are offering is not oversight, it is obstruction. The country deserves people who understand development, not those who attack it out of unfamiliarity.
The SSZ is not a radical experiment. It follows the same model that transformed Dubai from desert terrain into a global investment capital. When Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid first introduced free zones and investment corridors, his own junior officials tried to block him. They lacked vision, just as you do now. They feared what they did not understand, just as you do now. Yet the Sheikh pressed forward because he saw beyond their limitations. He famously challenged the doubters by saying: “Come back to me the day a foreign investor lifts a building and carries it out of Dubai.” And he was proven right. The investors eventually left, but the infrastructure remained. Jobs remained. A modern state remained. The country became richer, not poorer, because investment stayed in the form of permanent assets.
That same principle is at work in the SSZ. If an investor fails or withdraws, the infrastructure remains on our soil. It does not vanish. It does not leave with them. The economic value — the physical development — stays in the hands of the country and its people. This is how small states rise into global relevance: not by shutting out opportunity, but by structuring it intelligently.
Your opposition ignores the fact that the world’s most successful economies use this same tool. The United Kingdom operates Freeports and Crown Dependencies under near-zero tax frameworks. The Cayman Islands, Jersey, Guernsey, Singapore and Hong Kong are all shaped by investment-based economic zoning. They did not lose sovereignty — they gained competitiveness. They did not lose identity — they built prosperity. They are not weak. They are now financial powerhouses.
The truth is simple: what you are condemning is the exact model that built the modern world’s leading economies. You are not defending the nation — you are defending your own irrelevance in the face of a policy you cannot intellectually articulate. Your criticism is not about protecting St. Kitts and Nevis; it is about masking your inability to ever propose or deliver anything of similar vision during your time in office.
The SSZ offers infrastructure, employment and investment that will remain in St. Kitts and Nevis long after any investor departs. It is not a surrender of sovereignty — it is the strategic use of it. You are attacking it not because it is flawed, but because it exposes the absence of vision that defined your own years in leadership. A visionary policy threatens only those who lack the foresight to understand it.
St. Kitts and Nevis does not need more fear dressed up as “protection.” It needs courage, ambition and leadership grounded in knowledge, not insecurity. You had the chance to build and chose not to. Another administration is now building — and rather than support the progress, you criticise it from the sidelines. That is not statesmanship. That is resentment disguised as commentary.
The people of this nation deserve development rooted in vision, not opposition rooted in fear. The future belongs not to those who repeat yesterday’s limits, but to those who are willing to build beyond them.