“It was too much long talk,” some people said, suggesting that a bunch of the parliamentarians should have given the thing a pass.
Others argued that constituents had a legitimate expectation that those they elected would speak on their behalf even if, given deficits in articulateness and substance, half an hour was about 25 minutes too long for several of them.
The various representatives obviously agreed with the latter position.
So during last week’s Budget debate they all spoke at length, except – some kind of irony – the one called the Speaker.
I suppose I must allow for windbaggery during the Budget debate but I was glad that despite a fair amount of waffling, there was a decision-making/governance focus.
This seems too frequently these days not to be the point of concentration for our elected officials.
In the House of Assembly and outside, and more often than a wannabe maturing democracy should endure, they fix their attention elsewhere, often playing with seeming relish the roles of editorialist and attack dog.
Members of the Opposition, starved of the limelight and without the responsibilities of hands-on governance, may forgivably lapse in these ways, but not those on the Government side.
But it has become troublingly fashionable for a politician in his/her role as a Government functionary to move around the country holding forth on this or that issue – a kind of peripatetic windbag.
Imagine: a minister sits in Cabinet, the seat of (hopefully) grave decision-making, and they turn up all over Barbados gushing – not determined policy and/or rationale for such – but their two cents’ worth of opinion, as if they are reading an op-ed piece for the newspaper.
There is something out of sync with the nature of real governance when decision-makers go around editorializing as a matter of course.
A Government minister talking about Christians not being exemplary at work. A Prime Minister, bearing no policy position, takes to a rostrum and talks about same-sex marriage like any other power-deprived individual would have spoken.
When a minister so indulges, he or she stoops to a level no higher than a call-in talker, abandoning the lofty gift and calling of real governance, as if they were elected to the role of priest or soap-boxer.
And they receive no small amount of encouragement from the media, whose practitioners, in this regard, give the impression that they are not even trying to make judgements (face it: all news coverage is judgement and filtering) of what is news – fresh information of public value.
While lots of news is in want of coverage, the Press and company, attending to some perverse sense of duty, validate this foolishness, often carrying the ordinary, which if it had been spoken by the average person would not have been given the time of day.
This is so wrong.
For one thing, it contributes to a dumbing-down of the role of a person in governance. Giving governing politicians undue regard for social commentary distracts them into a cul-de-sac strewn with empty words, away from avenues of enlightened determinations.
It also, in this context, trains them in low appreciation of audience – after all, if you disseminate virtually anything they say, why should they up their game?
Additionally, it furthers a dangerous methodology in these parts that seems to trade on the belief that talk, in and of itself, accomplishes things.
In these postmodern days of relativism and every-man pontification, a Cabinet member’s voice in the opinion realm is simply one in a multitude of disparate sounds. Why, then, would anyone, given the chance to govern and decide, choose mostly to share his views with his “subjects”?
Through that course, governance of a country gets degraded and downgraded (no high standards and real poor) to editorializing.
Minister, parliamentary secretary, and such like, when you talk, even if you flavour it with opinion, let the focus be on policy, on decided or contemplated courses of action. You are a leader, not a preacher!
I so wish they would behave more like leaders in the House of Assembly, too. There, leadership is compromised in another disturbing way.
The hurling of insults, the bizarre revelling in taunting political rivals – asides often suggesting improprieties of no mean gravity – and the belligerent taking-down of opponents portray many of our politicians as being more like aggressive canines.
Even as they come into your living room through the television, they are seemingly foaming at the mouth and snarling.
So often the focus seems to be on trashing those on the other side.
Many of us could pragmatically stand, if not appreciate, a jab or two in the august chamber. But the steeping of House encounters in fierce behaviour, rather than in sound articulation of the virtues or demerits of this proposal or that one, is a very immature way of seeing after the people’s business.
Puff and ruff-ruff? Not good enough!
• Sherwyn Walters is a writer who became a teacher, a song analyst, a broadcaster and an editor.