THE PERVASIVE MOOD in Barbados today is one of worried silence. It is the kind of silence that hangs heavily in the air with the expectation of impending doom, and when the responsible actors accept that only painful options are possible but cannot admit this openly.
Indeed, if an assessment of the re-elected Freundel Stuart administration were to be proffered, it would be that the Government appears to be split both on the necessity of admission to a crisis and the robustness of the necessary corrective measures.
The fault lines of this split can be seen in the differences in the stances adopted by Commerce Minister Donville Inniss (the most instinctively neo-liberal of the Cabinet), who has acknowledged the need for difficult measures to curb Government expenditure on the one hand, and Minister of Finance Chris Sinckler (the most “politically minded” of the Cabinet) on the other. His instinct is to avoid political threats – much of which includes putting on an optimistic face to ward off bad facts, or shouting loudly when the contrary evidence appears too overwhelming.
Clearly in a mood of exasperated frustration, the head of the Private Sector Association, John Williams, has been forced to complain that “regrettably, too many of us seem to believe that by saying all is well our problems will go away, but they won’t”.
Since the 2013 election, largely as a result of the DLP’s tardiness in identifying the way forward, no new programme has been unfurled. All the negative diagnoses continue and several options, many of them painful, have been put on the table, but these appear too heavy a burden for the DLP to contemplate and for its razor-thin majority in Parliament to allow. Thus whilst the limits to the much touted Medium Term Fiscal Strategy have been openly declared, nothing new has taken its place.
In fact, the only useful purpose which the election seems to have served is to legitimize the Government’s continuation in office. The fresh mandate has allowed for no boldness or creativity.
Indeed, the Opposition too has been paralyzed by the uncertainty of the moment. Triply bruised by the unexpectedness, the narrowness, and the freshness of its defeat, it has been rendered motionless in the space between attack and defence, with a declaration of “critical support” neutralized by a base-building outreach into civil society clearly aimed at the long haul.
Not to be left out of the uncertainty is the wider society, which has been warned by persistent columnist Pat Hoyos to avoid the “silence of the lambs” heading for slaughter.
However, given the public’s endorsement of a campaign that denied rather than proposed concrete options, the silence is unsurprising. Conditioned to believe that little could be done, the public is now huddled in a corner, waiting for the bomb to drop.
•Tennyson Joseph is a political scientist at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, specializing in regional affairs. Email [email protected]
