UNLESS HE DOES OR SAYS something uncharacteristically spectacular in the few remaining weeks of his tenure, it seems virtually inevitable that Freundel Stuart’s sole memorable fleck of legacy as Prime Ministership was that he was the very first such office holder to defy public expectations and take his administration past the five-year term limit.
And not because of popular acclaim for a job exceptionally done, but rather despite repeated, long-standing and widespread requests, demands, hopes and wishes that he respects and responds to the mood of the people and call the general election before January 15, 2013. Voters could then free themselves of the failed administration he heads, not leads, since the latter would wrongfully imply that he had brought to his term in office the articulated vision and defined purpose the country still awaits after nearly 27 months as Prime Minister in his own right and another 33 months as deputy or acting prime minister.
Prior to Stuart’s compilation of the very dubious record of being the first Prime Minister to take an administration into a sixth year of office, no other prime minister had done so with all of them calling elections well within the five-year term that the public accords them from the day after polling day. Well known for his extreme slowness in decision-making and action-taking, the Barbadian public resent having been forced to endure for longer than was electorally necessary, a Prime Minister who never even began to come close to measuring up to all his predecessors whose legacies, unlike Stuart’s, boast of policies, programmes and actual achievements with which they are still identified.
That is why the public are unhappy with this extension of the well-established five-year term for a government and are loudly and persistently letting it be known that “Freundel’s Time Is Up”, that he had overstayed his welcome in office.
No wonder then that the Barbados Labour Party, ably led by Owen Arthur, and conscious of the sacrifices Grantley Adams and others made to win the right of the masses to vote, decided on a matter of fundamental principle to demonstrate its objection to the Democratic Labour Party’s trampling on a popular democratic expectation by refusing to support the DLP’s anti-democratic position, and deciding not to attend Parliament beyond the January 15, 2013 fifth anniversary of the January 15, 2008 election of the DLP to government.
The BLP’s stance has been strongly supported across the nation by people recognising that the David Thompson led boycott of Parliament in December 2007 had resulted from a personal disagreement with a ruling by the Speaker of the House of Assembly, as compared to the BLP looking after the national interest.
The popular chant that “Freundel Must Go” reflects realisation that after five years and more of DLP broken promises and mismanagement, Stuart has been unable to show that either him or his government is capable of taking the country back to the better days of the BLP under Owen Arthur and that elections were needed to make the change.
• Beresford Leon Padmore is a pseudonym for the Barbados Labour Party.
