PM Browne Champions Empowerment and Ownership in New Policy Initiatives

Prime Minister Gaston Browne has reaffirmed his commitment to empowering the citizens of Antigua and Barbuda through a comprehensive approach to economic development.

“I live by the motto ‘serve and empower,’ which has guided my political career,” Browne stated, when questioned about his vision for housing and economic development.

Read the PM’s complete statement below:

I have an unwavering commitment to empowering our people in all aspects of their development, including education, health care, housing, employment, sports, safety, cultural advancement, entrepreneurship, and broad ownership. I believe that ownership is empowerment. That is why we established the entrepreneurial fund to support and expand business ownership.

Domestic ownership has been expanded through land, home, share, car, boat and other asset business ownership. We subsidized the ownership of land and homes. Homes are subsidized up to $150K each. This is a deliberate policy to redistribute wealth to the working class. Our government has also developed its economic model of capital empowerment, a capitalist model driven by strong social underpinnings.

This model also calls for an entrepreneurial state that actively engages in entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship to expand collective domestic ownership of business assets, which are ordinarily beyond the private sector’s reach. The profits are further socialized by paying dividends into the consolidated fund to finance socio-economic development.

The model calls for greater domestic ownership, a reduction in profit repatriation, and a rapidly increased national capital formation through profit retention. Our recent policy decision of our government, mandating the acquisition of the branches of foreign banks by domestic banks, was precisely to expand the ownership class and to empower our people, instead of allowing our economy to become an extractive economy dominated by foreign interests.

Today, the asset base and profits of ACB and ECAB have risen significantly, providing more taxes for the government and unprecedented dividends to shareholders. The combined earnings for ACB and ECAB for 2024 were an unprecedented $ 115 M. My administration is now making beach and waterfront parcels of land available to locals to grow the Airbnb sector and expand domestic ownership of our hospitality sector.

Housing remains a cornerstone of our empowerment policy. We will ramp up home construction, which has slowed because of a lack of adequate Labour, by importing workers from our Caribbean islands to supplement the workforce at National Housing. National Housing was born out of my vision and strong commitment to addressing the skewed distribution of wealth and empowering our people through subsidized land and home ownership. It should be noted that in 2014, when I assumed office from the UPP administration, Antigua & Barbuda had among the most skewed GNIs in the world.

We have grown GNI per capita to just under $60K, and our empowerment policies are making significant progress in the restitution of wealth among the working class. People empowerment is a mantra by which I live. Serving people is love. My love for the people is so strong that I have been fighting unrelentingly to protect them, including protecting our country’s integrity from those who seek to besmirch and tear down our country. My commitment to protect and defend our people is such that I will take a bullet fighting for them. That’s the Rastafari love I have for our people.

Rastafari is love, integrity, inity, empathy, sharing, and caring; not smoking weed and wearing dreads.
I love to serve; I love to empower, and that is why I identify as Rastafari; seen.

Bless up,
RASTAMAN VIBRATION – JAH RASTAFARI