A?GENERAL?ELECTION, constitutionally due in 2013, will be decided not on talk, but what Government has done.
That is the view of Prime Minister Freundel Stuart as he addressed calls from some quarters that he was not talking enough to Barbadians.
Stuart, speaking yesterday after a tour of newly finished National Housing Corporation (NHC) units at Stuart Lodge and Country Park Towers, dismissed the charges, pointing to several occasions on which he had spoken including addresses to the business sector.
“I talk to Barbadians in a . . . varied range of circumstances and a varied range of things,” he said.
“It [the charge] has no validity about it, and the persons who are promoting [it] are well known to me.
“I am not deceived about anything that I hear from them. It is not without significance that the radio station that promotes it and the newspaper that promotes it all use the same spoon to drink their soup from the same pot. . . . I am not at all affected by any of that.”
Stuart said that “at the end of the day, the people of Barbados will want to know not how often the Prime Minister has talked – that is not what the election is going to be decided on. It is what the Government has achieved. And that is what we are dealing with”.
He said people felt that “he was jolted [from] some deep and long slumber on October 23 last year and brought kicking and screaming into politics or plucked from a monastery where I was insulated from all the secular influences to which much more fortunate human beings have been exposed”.
The Prime Minister said he had seen more of politics than a lot of people who were talking.
“They will soon learn that they are talking to themselves and there is nothing wrong with a soliloquy from time to time. It is just that this a fairly protracted soliloquy. They can continue to talk to themselves,” Stuart said.
