I wish all of my readers a Merry Christmas, happy, peaceful holiday season and God’s richest blessings for 2012.
The current year has been tough locally and internationally. The new one portends more of the same and probably worse. Across the western world, political leaders and economic experts grimly predict years of further financial challenges and national decline.
The first year of the second decade of the 21st century has seen extraordinary change, particularly the “Arab Spring”. The thrust for freedom exploded across the intractable, autocratic republics of North Africa through the Middle East to the Persian Gulf, toppling long-standing dictators Gaddafi and Mubarak and driving super-wealthy oligarchic monarchs to the drawing board.
Popular uprisings in the republics alerted Arab monarchies to the imperative need to adjust to changing times and their population’s rising expectations. After demonstrations in Jordan, the king appointed a new government. In Bahrain and Saudi Arabia young people got restless forcing changes.
What started as a minority movement driven by a desire for political freedom, developed into mass-based clamour for change from Tunisia, through Libya to Egypt. Sadly, despotic Syria continues to savagely buck the trend.
Happily, Western fears of a regional Islamic takeover never materialized. Though the army-controlled regime in Egypt is causing global concern, the desire region-wide is for democracy and political respect for the rule of law.
The role of emerging technologies was stark and powerful. Converging with and at the epicentre of the uprising of oppressed populations was the ubiquitous Internet, particularly social networks Facebook and Twitter, providing easy contact between protestors where public meetings were outlawed.
This year also saw the worsening economic situation in Western democracies and further growth of the “eastern tigers”, financial powerhouses China and India, moving rapidly to the centre of global economic gravity.
The 17-nation single currency bloc in the European Union plummeted into a state of economic disaster, bringing down the prime ministers of Italy and Greece. Normally strong France is eyeballing a Standard & Poor’s downgrade.
In Europe, North Africa, Middle East and Gulf Region, 2011 has brought monumental change.
The director of the Middle East Centre at Oxford, Professor Eugene Rogan, said: “But while high hopes can drive people to achieve great things, dashed hopes can prove just as powerful a force for ill.”
In 2012, the world will watch anxiously to see where else hopes are achieved or dashed.
That brings me home to the newspaper political brouhaha riveting public interest. Breaking in the SUNDAY SUN on December 11, it is sending seismic rumblings through the Democratic Labour Party with the potential to hurt it electorally.
Following publication of the draft letter to Prime Minister Stuart on behalf of 11 parliamentarians including senior Cabinet ministers, a number of those named rushed to say they were not involved and consulting attorneys. What for, one wonders?
Only one, Minister of Finance Chris Sinckler, had the testicular fortitude to publicly admit there was a letter seeking an urgent meeting with the Prime Minister to discuss issues of weakness in leadership and inertia and drift afflicting the Government and threatening the party’s return to office.
These are serious, fundamental issues. Significantly, no one else admitted publicly misgivings over the Prime Minister’s leadership style when for months the public has heard of great and growing concern with his protracted silences on key issues and paralyzing tardiness in making decisions.
It is amazing that to alert him to their urgent concerns it was necessary to draft a letter. In any organization, there will be concerns of one kind or another. Colleagues, in the interest of the organization, will share them with their boss. Indeed, in properly run organizations, it is their collective responsibility so to do.
That the so-called “Eager Eleven” found it necessary to write speaks to a catastrophic communications breakdown between the first among equals and themselves. Surely after one of their pre-parliamentary caucuses they could have asked for a meeting?
Or at the end of a Cabinet meeting, ask the secretary to leave and discuss what troubles them. That it became necessary to draft a note speaks volumes about the relationship between the Prime Minister and colleagues and the strange modus operandi of the Government he leads.
A leader lights his candle from colleagues’ torches.
It beggars belief that requesting a meeting to discuss what the population at large is saying should be interpreted as an attempted palace coup by their representatives, making collegiality sinister and prompting the promise of heads rolling. Focus on the message, not the messengers.
Barbadians at the summit of this season of cheer and goodwill are deeply concerned that all is not well with their Government. A united front is fundamental going into another difficult year. Have history’s lessons been forgotten or just ignored?
