BLP COLUMN: Fairness and truth

Fairness and truth were a formidable tag team at the Barbados Labour Party’s well-attended meeting in Heroes Square last Sunday night.Mia Mottley delivered a surgical prosecution of Michael Lashley’s response to his sacked chairman, Marilyn Rice-Bowen, and to his performance as Minister of Housing.Truth discovered that Lashley never answered the charge laid by Rice-Bowen that there was no contract in place with the contractor for the building of houses at Constant in St George.Truth was not fooled by Lashley’s attempt to hoodwink the Members of Parliament and Bajans into believing that a term sheet for a loan with CLICO International General Insurance was any sort of contract, finance or otherwise.Truth was found in the minutes of the National Housing Corporation (NHC), presented by Mia, that expressed both the general manager and the board’s alarm that despite repeated efforts, the contractor had not signed a contract.Truth and the crowd concluded that Michael Lashley had been grossly economical with the truth. Fairness determined that it was unjust to acquire a man’s land for development when he had applied to develop the same land for the same purpose.Fairness ruled that there was no equity in the award of NHC building contracts with one large contractor getting 75 per cent of the work.Fairness considered it a backward step in the empowerment of small contractors that they had now been reduced to the role of sub-contractors and not given the opportunity to grow their businesses.Fairness was flabbergasted that 220 000 square feet of our land should be “rented” to a big contractor for 99 years at the peppercorn rent of $100 a year!Fairness questioned why the NHC had not insisted on a rent-sharing agreement for the commercial buildings to be built on the land.Fairness took a dim view of the haste with which the planning permission had been granted for Coverley when other developers just down the road at Searles had been waiting for six years on their permissions.Truth and fairness both agreed that Michael Lashley should resign his Cabinet appointment and, if he failed to do so, that Acting Prime Minister Freundel Stuart should fire him. After all, this blue-eyed boy had come to office on the ideals of transparency, accountability and good governance. Bruised and battered, black and blue by fairness and truth, he is being defended by some of his Cabinet colleagues as a paragon of virtue. He was systematically disrobed by speaker after speaker on the BLP’s platform. When all the layers of public relations had been stripped away, we saw a man who had overstepped the boundaries of his authority with the NHC board; a man who failed to admit to the truth of the charges laid against him by his former chairman; a man who practically gave away the Government’s land to a wealthy contractor; a man who had not lived up to the promise of his party’s manifesto to give work to the small man.The Dems’ defence for such behaviour is that he is getting the job done. We disagree. He has fallen far short of their promise to provide 2 000 houses a year.And even so we cannot condone his behaviour for the sake of expediency. If his Cabinet colleagues are so blinded by the light of this 40-watt bulb that they cannot rein him in, then they deserve to fall with him. Errol Barrow backed fairness and truth when he dismissed popular Minister of Housing Joy Edwards. What will it take for Freundel to follow Barrow’s example?