BLP legacy: started Barbados’ single largest road project ever for the expansion of the ABC Highway from two to four lanes from Warrens to Graeme Hall; 11 roads were rehabilitated under a special Scotland District project impacting St John, St Joseph, St Andrew and St Thomas.
For quite some time, this pitiable Democratic Labour Party Government had executed a policy of going to extraordinary lengths to project itself as both a successful and a united team. This technique was highlighted most recently by a sudden explosion of announcements of the coming of multimillion-dollar projects, evoking chillingly vivid memories of the photograph of a stick-thin David Thompson, leaving what was to prove to be his dying bed, to turn the sod for the “start” of the still dormant Pickering, St Lucy enterprise, in a vain attempt to seemingly prove both that he was not that seriously ill and that the project was a viable and imminent one.
However, this technique was recently exposed for the cynical public relations ploy that it truly is, especially where the matter of unity is concerned, with the revelation of a letter written by Minister David Estwick about his colleague Christopher Sinckler, that shocked our nation both for the brutality of its language and the audacity that it could have been written in the first place, and apparently gotten away with too.
Estwick’s letter prohibiting members of management and staff of the Barbados Water Authority (BWA), for which he has ministerial responsibility, from attending project review committee meetings called by Sinckler, has left local constitutional and political experts scrambling to unearth its equivalent in previous Cabinets in Barbados or other countries governed by the principle of collective responsibility under the Westminster-style Government.
It also betrays a great deal about Estwick, the nature of intra-party personal relationships and most of all the style and substance of the leadership of Prime Minister Freundel Stuart, who by tradition is supposed to be first among equals in the Cabinet he personally selected.
That Estwick chose to write in reference to a fellow Cabinet member in such a tone and with such content as far back as September 8, 2011, has put into meaningful context his public outburst earlier this year over inadequate finances for his ministry when he also floated talk of resignation, given that Sinckler is Minister of Finance.
The public now better understands why the so-called Eager Eleven would have resorted to writing as well to Stuart over his leadership. Both letters reflect a state of dysfunctional internal relationships where hostile intransigence would have prevented things from being privately improved in keeping with sound camaraderie.
Having not seen the promised rolling of heads materialize, Estwick possibly felt that his public outcry was likely to go unpunished. Rather than being “punished”, he is seen as having been “rewarded” by Stuart by being made Acting Prime Minister. This latest failure by Stuart to reassert his authority has reconfirmed public perception that he has repeatedly fallen short of the strong and decisive leadership we had grown accustomed to from Prime Ministers Barrow, Adams and Arthur, and for which there is no substitute for inspiring a nation, especially in the current economic and governance crisis. No wonder the public clamours for more of Owen Arthur’s successful and forceful economic and other leadership skills.
• Beresford Leon Padmore is a pseudonym for the Barbados Labour Party.
