Maroon chief under fire as election looms

WESTERN BUREAU:

Incumbent head of the Accompong Maroons, Colonel Ferron Williams, will face a leadership challenge from four contenders when affiliates of the St Elizabeth-based enclave go to the polls on Thursday.

While his challengers, including former Colonel Meredith Rowe, have branded Williams a failure, the soft-spoken chief said that Accompong Town has undergone modernisation, with investments in housing, water, transport, roads, and Internet service.

“I have served with much success and I have every confidence that I will be re-elected” Williams told The Gleaner, dismissing critics as resistant to technological change.

However, the challengers, Robert Cawley, Sheldon Wallace, Richard Curry, and Rowe, are all claiming that Williams had got too close to the Jamaican Government and had departed from cultural traditions.

Rowe charged that the incumbent was a non-performer, overseeing an administration that lacked accountability, with no council and no meeting.

“In the first place, if he had pride and dignity he would not even think of contesting this election,” Rowe told The Gleaner on Tuesday.

“His performance is flat, from 2009 he is here until now. From August 2019, residents took away the key to the office because he is not performing. He has no accountability. We have no council, no meetings, to the point when we have a Maroon celebration, no meetings are kept with the citizens as it is customary.”

Wallace, who is confident that he will unseat Williams, said that Accompong Town has been going downhill for the past 25 years because of incompetent leaders.

“This man, Ferron Williams, has been in power for over 12 years and he is a waste. He is a complete waste of a man, a complete waste of a leader,” said Wallace.

He ridiculed Williams for seeking approval from the Holness administration to cultivate marijuana.

“It is shameful to say that he is a Maroon,” he said.

Cawley, the son of former Maroon Colonel Harris Cawley, said he is contesting Thursday’s election because he feared that Maroons were ceding their sovereignty. Under his leadership, he said, Maroons would bow only to God.

Curry, who is equally confident of victory, said that he was committed to preserving the freedoms wrested by Maroon ancestors after the peace treaty inked more than 280 years ago. He also believes that Williams is politically compromised.

“We have a colonel who is caught in a Jamaica Labour Party Area Four Council meeting in his green shirt. That is an embarrassment to the Maroon culture and to the Maroon sovereignty,” said Curry.