FINALLY, AND within a day of each other, the respective manifestoes for the February 21 general election will be available to the public from the Opposition Barbados Labour Party (BLP) and the incumbent Democratic Labour Party (DLP).
Therefore, as has often happened elsewhere within our Caribbean Community, the Barbadian electorate have a week to read, compare and determine which of these two traditional contestants for control of state power deserve to be victorious.
It’s a choice Grenadian voters will also face, two days earlier, when they trek to polling stations next Tuesday (February 19) to confirm projections by some pollsters and commentators of a return to power of former three-term Prime Minister Keith Mitchell’s New National Party (NNP). This is the haunting fear of supporters of current first-time Prime Minister Tillman Thomas’ National Democratic Congress (NDC).
There are some sharp differences in leadership style, campaign strategies, and fiscal and economic challenges between the incumbent parties in Barbados and Grenada. However, the common factor they share is that both here and in the Spice Isle, Prime Ministers Freundel Stuart and Thomas are first-timers as heads of government and, equally, facing strong challenges, respectively, from two former three-term prime ministers – Owen Arthur and Mitchell.
Of course, unlike the scenario and tension in Grenada, Stuart’s incumbent DLP does not have to contend with the politically bruising spectacle that Thomas is facing with former close, influential party colleagues and ex-cabinet ministers – among them former minister of foreign affairs Karl Hood – openly identifying with Mitchell NNP’s campaign thrust of no “second chance” for the NDC.
Here in Barbados, the “second chance” syndrome is perhaps a most crucial consideration for voters since there is no precedence for restricting an incumbent party to just one term. And though pollsters and social commentators continue to give the winning edge to the BLP, both Bees and Dems are attracting significant levels of support at campaign meetings amid lingering speculation about “swing votes” in identified marginal constituencies.
Meanwhile, Barbadians and Grenadians would be aware, as they peruse the manifestoes of the Bees and Dems and those in Grenada, that their respective countries are among five others in the region identified by the Caribbean Development Bank as having “unsustainable debt levels” that require a raft of urgent measures to “anchor investor confidence . . . ”.
In the circumstances, it appears that whatever the outcome on voting day, the “retrenchment bell” could well toll for the public sector in both Barbados and Grenada as the social and economic woes deepen for Jamaicans.
• Rickey Singh is a noted Caribbean journalist. Email [email protected].
