Our Prime Minister believes in conferences. He has attempted to organize many over the years, but his conference invitees do not always agree with his agenda, because he is the only one setting it, the sole content decider.

We were again notified that he will be organizing the “Common Good Conference – The Home We Build Together,” for the end of this month (January 30th).

Which is an odd name, since extraordinarily little common good decisions have been taken lately.

For example, the revelation regarding succession, but more about that later.

The conference will be open to all sectors on the island and the purpose of it is to: “explore how government, the private sector, and civil society in Aruba can work together to strengthen social cohesion, dignity, opportunity, and long-term wellbeing.”

That is a mouthful.

The conference wants to plan a session where companies and the government sign MOUs and commit to working together on concrete projects that advance the common good. Examples: financial sponsorship, in-kind support, or employee engagement through volunteering or professional expertise.

In summary, our prime minister wants the private sector to DO MORE.

Which is difficult, because the private sector already carries a lot on its shoulders, while the government is spending and spending, without any cutbacks or austerity plans.

The conference is asking us if we have any specific ideas or projects that we wish to highlight and commit to during this conference – YES, road repair, improved gray water treatment, affordable housing, streamlined tax code, indirect taxation, recycling, vacation rental regulation. Every five-year-old here, can rattle off the list, we do not need to hand it in, the list is public.

The Aruba Hotel & Tourism Association mailed the prime minister’s office the link to its Impact Awards nominee listings, so he can be aware of the common good efforts that companies have already been committed to.

The only MOU I am interested to sign is the one committing public sector reform and savings.

And while we are talking…

The prime minister revealed his wish to see our Minister of Tourism as his successor to the prime ministry.

This would be a serious mistake.

But we recognize the same patterns we have seen before. The same character traits that defined Tico Croes /Otmar Oduber when they entered politics are visible again: Excessive self-confidence, a large ego, limited depth of experience, and strong speaking skills that create the illusion of substance. These are individuals who can speak for hours without saying anything meaningful, let alone delivering tangible results.

By openly positioning Wendrick Cicilia as his preferred successor, Mike Eman, his mentor for the last ten years, is effectively setting him up for failure.

(And he really does not mean it. He just got himself a front man, a marionette, while he stays backstage pulling the strings, without being burdened by constant, excessive visibility. Mike is not retiring, it is not in his DNA,)

Under normal circumstances, before entrusting someone with party leadership, a simple but important question should be asked: What concrete achievements has he delivered as Minister of Tourism that justify this confidence? So far, we struggle to identify a single result that inspires trust.

Cicilia appears to be following the same path as his long-time mentor, focusing on easy, low-impact issues rather than addressing the structural challenges Aruba faces today. Confidence without proven results is not leadership. Ego without accountability is not vision.

What concerns us most is that he seems to have been trained and mentored in an outdated political management style, one that no longer works in a fast-changing, complex world. Aruba needs adaptive leadership, grounded in expertise, execution, and humility, not recycled grandstanding from another era.

We saw this coming. Who in his right minds puts a newcomer, a political stagier, as #1 of his party list of candidates. History has a way of repeating itself when warnings are ignored, this rising star phenomenon feels uncomfortably familiar.

If the party genuinely wants renewal, it must look beyond personal preferences and loyalty and instead demand performance, substance, and results. Anything less risks repeating past mistakes at a moment when Aruba cannot afford them.

In the U.S. they talk about the tragic ICE shooting to avoid talking about the cost of living, inflation, health care premiums, and other unhappy subjects related to the life of ordinary Americans. Here we praise the late Henny Eman, and focus the conversation on his considerable achievements, instead of looking at what needs fixing here and now.

I listened to the recent interview of Tico Croes on NoticiaCla, and it focused on the past, on his time as a minister in the Henny Eman cabinet.

It was interesting to be reminded how Status Aparte evolved, how Henny lobbied for the trade of independence, against independence within the kingdom.

But we cannot live in the past. Financing student loans was a clever move, AZV was a remarkable benefit, but we should pay utmost attention to the present and the future. Stop clinging and idolizing to the past.

What truly matters is using the lessons learned to avoid repeating mistakes and to drive improvement, innovation, and more creative, forward-thinking solutions to today’s structural bottlenecks and challenges.

In the interview with Tico Croes, on NoticiaCla we heard very little acknowledgment of the current CHALLENGES or of how they will be addressed in a practical and realistic way going forward.

Which brings me to Robertico “Tico” Croes, The Minister of Tourism, 1994 to 1998, and the Minister of Finance 1998 to 2001. He left Aruba following an election defeat, as he lost faith in his political career and his professional prospects. After all his last name was Croes, and at a party founded, and managed by Emans, it was a disadvantage.

Having had a successful political career in Aruba from 1986 to 2001, he pushed the reset button, and settled in Florida. He went on to enjoy a solid academic career, when he joined UCF Rosen College, in 2002. He is still there only semi-retired, professor Emeritus, doing special projects, but he publicly reported his plans to return to Aruba in a few years, probably as his young son prepares to go to college.

Going back in time, I remember Tico was the crown prince of the AVP party, he was to succeed Henny Eman as party leader and eventually become prime minister. But AVP lost the election, and the party was disillusioned with him as the new leader.

(Which is a pattern in Aruba. Young politicians’ careers take off brilliantly, then get trampled and destroyed. Some end up in prison.)

That’s when they recruited Mike. An Eman. Mike initially had no plans to go into politics, he worked as a lawyer in Chuchu’s notary office, that’s his sister, and was earning a decent salary never planning to throw himself fully into politics.

He could however not refuse the call to “rescue” AVP and in fact spent 8 years in the opposition before he became Prime Minister for the first time.

Tico who took part in the 2001 election garners 2,515 votes, as future party leader. Just for the sake of comparison, Nelson Oduber the leader of the opposition who ended up the winner, collected 4,891 votes.

Tico at the time was living around Santa Cruz in a lovely area, but Santa Cruz is MEP territory, and he did not manage to charm his neighbors to vote for him. (Which is a pattern in Aruba, being stuck in the old ways.)

There were also credible reports claiming he was involved in questionable financial dealings, and finally he was convicted in connection to a 50-million-florin fraud involving Fondo di Desaroyo Aruba, for which he performed community service – the sentence was converted to a conditional one plus 240 hours of community service due to the long duration of the case.

I asked my friends about it no one remembered. They remembered the racetrack which contributed to AVPs political defeat, and economic losses for Aruba.

What they did remember is that Tico Croes is highly intelligent and educated. He has written several books, and when you look at his LinkedIn résumé, you will be genuinely impressed. Aruba missed out on a good leader, because of power plays and internal party conflicts.

In the NoticiaCla interview Tico shared he is now the president of the Henny Eman foundation and as such will be active in the community.

The 25 year old Robertico Tico Croes story stuck with me as a lost opportunity.  A loss for the country, that perhaps now with him returning, will be atoned, if the sharks and the opportunists will let it happen for the good of the country,

The millennium was a turbulent time on the island, but we should remember that Tico Croes stepped down as AVP leader right after the election loss, taking responsibility for the result and relinquishing the leadership, after which the party leadership transitioned internally, to an Eman.

One of my friends writes: It is sad to say that the only thing many people remember about him is the corruption case. If they look back at history, much of the credit is given to Henny, yet he was the driving force behind much of the success that shaped Aruba into the new Aruba. I still have a great deal of admiration for him, and we stay in contact. Throughout my career, I have collaborated with many impressive executives, and I can honestly say that he stands above them all.

From social media: And I guess the party under the tent located “pabow” of the airport roundabout “rotonda de las Americas” that disrupted the traffic at the worst possible hour yesterday afternoon was to “baptize” the street? It was a huge-huge mess trying to go around the roundabout…

The renaming of the street running from the roundabout at Mahuma to the roundabout at Sun Plaza, after Aruba’s first prime minister Henny Eman, produced a monumental traffic jam. It also delivered speeches. I thought the address of the former AHATA CEO, and the current university lecturer Jim Hepple, was worth reading.

Here it goes: I am deeply honored to have been asked to offer some brief remarks this evening on the contribution Prime Minister Henny Eman made to the evolution of Aruba’s tourism industry consequent upon his taking office in 1986.

In the January of 1986 Henny Eman faced what, to many, would have seemed an insurmountable crisis.

He had assumed office at the same time as Aruba had achieved its long-desired Status Aparte and expectations in the community were naturally running high. However, in March of the previous year, the Lago refinery had closed, throwing Aruba’s economy into a deep recession.

Tourism, at that time the second pillar of the economy, was not flourishing, with overall visitor arrival numbers stagnant at just over 200,000 visitors a year and with Venezuelan arrivals having fallen sharply between 1982 from one third of all arrivals to less than 10% by 1985.

While international trips worldwide had grown substantially between 1960 and 1970, and by a further 67% between 1970 and 1980, as with Aruba, that growth had stalled in the early 1980s.

Given that context, it is remarkable that Henny had the vision to decide that a dramatically expanded tourist sector was best for Aruba.

Henny was by no means the first Aruban to recognize the tourism sector’s potential, but he was the first to truly make it happen.

The decision was made not to just focus on overall visitor arrivals but to invest in developing an infrastructure and product and to implement marketing campaigns that would appeal to an affluent consumer from a stable market, specifically the north-east United States.

This was in acknowledgement of the fact that Aruba was seen to be an expensive destination and if the Aruban economy was to grow as desired, visitors with high disposable incomes needed to be attracted to ensure the maximum benefit to our country.

Eman didn’t just choose tourism – he created the legislative and regulatory framework that made Aruba attractive to international hotel brands while preserving our cultural identity

This highly focused strategy was enormously successful as was seen by the visitor numbers, which grew from 207,000 in 1985 to 619,000 ten years later, with the number of visitors from the USA more than doubling from 152,000 to 345,000 during the same ten years.

History shows us that truly transformative leaders share certain qualities. They see reality clearly, but they refuse to be constrained by it. As with two prime examples such as Lee Kuan Yew, who looked at a resource-poor Singapore and saw a future global hub for finance, trade and technology, and Sheikh Rashid al Maktoum, who envisioned Dubai as a global crossroads when it had a fraction of its neighbors’ oil wealth, Henny echoed George Bernard Shaw’s famous words made popular by Robert Kennedy “Some men see things as they are and ask why. I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?”

Leaders such as Henny didn’t just manage economies—they reimagined their nations’ identities and then implemented all things necessary to achieve their dreams.

But, as with everything, the world moves on and pivot decisions age. The tourism sector has its lifecycle, and competitiveness must be renewed, and new strategies must be implemented to reflect the new realities.

Let us honor Henny by ensuring that his decision was not in vain and take all actions necessary to ensure that Aruba’s tourism sector will continue to thrive and flourish in the years to come.

Thank you.

With the Prime Minister scheduled to retire from his party’s leadership in September 2026, it is worth reflecting on what this decision reveals about the broader trajectory of his leadership and the political realities confronting Aruba. From the beginning of this current term, it was evident that the country’s most pressing challenges were structural in nature, including tourism saturation, infrastructure strain, housing pressure, labor constraints, and environmental limits.

The governing approach has consistently emphasized stability, continuity, and visible progress. Policy initiatives tended to focus on measures that delivered quick, tangible outcomes and public reassurance. In practice, this resulted in a focus on easily attainable measures that created the appearance of action, while avoiding direct confrontation with the deeper issues that demanded political resolve. While this approach reinforced confidence and maintained political support, it also meant that deeper bottlenecks, those requiring sustained enforcement, institutional reform, and difficult trade-offs, remained largely unaddressed.

Over time, it became increasingly clear that confronting these structural constraints would demand an extraordinary level of political will, a highly experienced and unified governing team, and a readiness to absorb significant public resistance. Structural reform would inevitably disrupt established interests, challenge growth expectations, and place strain on political alliances. The cost of such action would not be temporary, nor politically neutral.

At the same time, the Prime Minister appeared to recognize that his leadership had reached a peak in credibility and public standing. Undertaking the most difficult reforms at this stage would likely have reshaped his legacy, shifting it from one of stability and continuity to one defined by confrontation and short-term disruption. In that context, restraint can be interpreted not as indecision, but as an acknowledgment of the limits imposed by political capital, institutional capacity, and timing.

Rather than pursuing reforms that would almost certainly erode support and fracture consensus, leadership increasingly emphasized manageability over transformation. The decision to retire can therefore be understood as a deliberate transition, creating space for a new generation of leaders who may possess both the ambition and the willingness to pay the political price required to address Aruba’s unresolved bottlenecks.

By stepping aside at a moment of relative strength, the Prime Minister preserves stability while implicitly acknowledging that the next phase of Aruba’s development will require a different form of leadership. The challenge ahead is whether this generational handover will be matched by the resolve, expertise, and institutional alignment necessary to confront issues that can no longer be deferred.

Our first Prime Minister deserve a street named after him, but what does it mean for neighbors who have been living at a certain address and now find themselves living at another? It means doing the rounds, banks, KVK, DIMP, Elmar, Web, an endless number of people and organizations that must be notified of the change.

My sympathies to all those walking the walk. I recently did the address change rounds, and every day I discover other people and organizations that must be informed. Be patient, my friends.

On the occasion of naming a major traffic artery, cluttered by businesses and homes,  after his late brother, from the rotonda of Mahuma, past the airport to the Sun Plaza rotonda, our prime minister announced he was stepping down from the AVP party leadership, indicating that he is perhaps also ready to let go of the MinPres title, down the road.

He went through a lot in past years, standing by his wife, during her illness, and might be aiming at a less hectic life.

He must be tired. The elders making up the AVP party board members are conservative and old fashioned, and the cabinet ministers do as they please. It must be like herding cats. Trying to take control organize or coordinate these two groups of individuals.

So, I suspect MinPres gave up the task of nailing Jello to the wall. During his first year in power, MinPres devoted his energy to planting trees, cleaning up neighborhoods and improving the life of the elderly. These are areas dear to his heart and he should be allowed to continue to dedicate his energy to his pet projects.

But managing a country in 2026, cannot rely on trees, dumpsters, and medications. The island needs a visionary leader. Young, dynamic, educated with some work and life experience under his belt.

Some of my friends, root for Trevor Eman, he has the pedigree – he is Mike’s nephew, has very warm and friendly parents. He has been racing cars internationally under the Aruba logo, and managed to complete an education, gain some helpful work experience at his family business, in between races. He squeezed in two kids too. Trevor has turned down the offer to join the family’s club, the political arena, for many years, but perhaps now that he is older and wiser – he has always been charming, he might change his mind.

My other friends hope that crown prince Wendrick Cecilia and party princess Stephanie Sevinger rise to the occasion, now that MinPres is ready to pass the baton.

But rumors indicate that the prince must still learn to get along, and provide the goods, besides a good talk. The princess has truly little work experience. To run this place, business experience is better than political heritage.

Another friend suspects Minister Geoffrey Wever, FUTURO, might join the AVP party to run for party leadership in September. He is ambitious, and on a fast track to top. Who knows, lets see what happens, much of this island’s government rests on his shoulders, as the Minister of Finance, Economic Affairs, and Primary Sector.