It has been happening with such monotonous regularity that people are no longer surprised when it does. Depressed, yes. But surprised? Definitely not. For once again, Freundel Stuart has demonstrated why growing numbers of people are daily commenting on his increasingly obvious lack of the leadership characteristics essential to being an effective Prime Minister.
The latest damning incident involves Stuart’s declaration of being “flabbergasted to discover that what we spend on the importation of oil can be compared with the amount of money we spend on education”, something that was “not satisfactory” and as a result “renewable energy is a front-burner agenda item for Barbados”. Such utterances are highly instructive, revealing tremendous insight into the depth of his frightening unfamiliarity with what is going at the highest level in the administration he heads and is supposed to be leading. Heading and leading are two vastly different activities.
That’s because it is exceedingly hard to believe that someone who for nearly a year now had either consistently acted as Prime Minister or has been PM in his own right, could only now be confronting the huge cost of imported oil with all the naive air of original discovery. Such striking disbelief would be made all the more disturbing with the recollection that for most of that same period, Stuart would also have acted as Minister of Finance and therefore would have had direct responsibility for and access to such important economic information. To many people, all of this amounts to the unwitting revelation of a lack of serious interest in and application to the all-important field of economics.
No wonder then that the acutely and widely detected state of drift into which Barbados found itself when the late PM David Thompson would have been privately and publicly ailing, had been prolonged when Stuart was appointed by Thompson to act as Prime Minister and Minister of Finance, and has now become even more chronic with Stuart as the substantive PM and supposedly supervising Chris Sinckler as Minister of Finance and Economic Affairs.
What makes Stuart’s apparent sudden and great appreciation of the urgent desirability of renewable energy so ridiculous, is that under A Creative Energy Policy, page 21 of the DLP’s winning 2008 manifesto states: “The next DLP government is prepared to be bold and move aggressively in the area of energy conservation, reducing the oil import bill and preserving our delicate environment for the future,” having on Page 20 lamented that the “single biggest challenge “ was the “drain on foreign exchange created by the high cost of oil”. This was “amplified” by the fact that crude oil hovered around US$100 per barrel, with it being reliably forecast that such prices were likely to “remain in this range for the foreseeable future”. People can be forgiven for concluding that the DLP is not even familiar with its own manifesto.
Given that Stuart’s enduring state of inaction had prevailed even when Thompson had “devolved” all power on him as Acting Prime Minister without any energised leadership being perceived, it is increasingly being said that the “new driver” not only “cannot drive” but apparently “will not” do so, virtually paralysed in a near permanent state of leadership inactivity. And then they longingly remember the highly active, productive and prosperous days of the Owen Arthur administrations.
