Some parents in the Virgin Islands (VI) are reportedly struggling to repay school loans, even though their children are now in very good positions to absorb those loans.

Those children fitting that situation were described by Premier and Minister of Finance Honourable Andrew A Fahie (R1) as "wicked wretches".

Premier Fahie was at the time debating the motion at the 13th Sitting of the Second session of the Fourth House of Assembly (HoA) at Save the Seed Energy Centre in Duff's Bottom, Tortola, on July 28, 2020, for the establishment of a committee to lead the reforming of the VI Constitution.

The statement was used as an analogy to reference the struggles of those who fought for freedom from slavery.

"That's the problem with some of our people.When they come back they gone up on the ladder and they don't want to see their mother and father. They kick down the ladder; they don't want to see nobody else come up.

"Nobody must move with them. They nose up in the air and they wonder when they fall why they fell," Premier Fahie remarked.

Wicked wretches

Hon Fahie added that he knows there are parents still fighting to pay loans for their children because they sent them to school “and the child come back making major money still leave the loan to their parents and never take it up."

It was at this juncture he said of those guilty, "What a set of wicked wretch."

According to Premier Fahie, the tendency of a Virgin Islander is to sacrifice all they have to make sure their children are properly educated.

“Even if they (parents) didn’t go to school they would sell a piece of land to make sure that their child go to school.”

He argued that his reasons for taxing remittances leaving the Territory through money transfer services are justified.

"That is why I will take that seven percent from Western Union and build that old people home for some of them that their children turn their back on them."

"Ayo could do what you want there with that because it hurts an old person when they know that when they spend all they had to send a child to school and they get back and they are speaking the Queen’s English and they forget about the people who send them."

In a rhetorical mode, Premier Fahie challenged persons to picture their ancestors seeing the VI in its current state, knowing that they had fought to get the Territory to where it is today.

"But if we don’t move forward to get it better, they would just turn in their grave and realise that we have no respect for the blood that they shed in the dungeons they were in and the murders of them fighting coming forward so that we could be free and move to the next level."