A most dangerous thing happened in this li’l island about two weeks ago. And worse followed.
On Thursday, May 8, the Governor of the Central Bank Dr DeLisle Worrell sent a letter to THE NATION, saying that “consequent upon the lack of professional integrity manifest in the NATION’s Front Page headline of Thursday, May 8”, the newspaper’s staff would not be invited to any Press conferences or media events he was hosting as governor.
The Mighty Sparrow sang The Governor’s Ball. We now have the Governor’s gall – a public officer barring all operatives of a media house from his Press conferences. You could imagine that?
But yuh know what is even worse? That nuhbody with clout didn’t just as quickly lower a boom in defence of a valued thing.
Yuh know like how in February the Chamber of Commerce in Bermuda send its executive director Joanne MacPhee through de eddoes in a flash fuh yelling at protesting workers that they should go back to work ’cause they should be glad they have jobs and they should be more concerned about feeding their families?
She, a high-profile officer of an organisation that, according to its then president, “represents all of Bermuda and wholeheartedly supports the rights of unions and their membership”, had offended against a fundamental right in a democracy.
The president was on pun she like Spandex tights that were four sizes too small. He called the views she expressed “unacceptable and offensive”.
And although she apologised unambiguously and profusely, describing her words as “completely inappropriate” and “ridiculous” and admitting that she had allowed her recent bitter experience of unemployment to influence her (even acknowledging that her intemperate utterances “could have a very devastating effect on my life”), in two days the board sent her back on the breadline.
Face it: people in authority in Barbados have neither the b. . . . nor the zeal for prized values to take such action. Here our leaders, in pursuing their own agendas, may have whipping words for “little people” and political opponents. But sturdy backbone in response to weighty ethical failings in public affairs by their own big-ups? Nope.
For all our boasts of superior schooling and “punching above our weight”, our leaders are shamefully weak in this area.
Now, it might not be appropriate to fire the governor, but somebody with power should at least have delivered a walloping public reproach and a demand for a retraction (and no replacement with a puny-minded, self-serving “you will still get all Press releases” either) that woulda mek the begalling fellow know in his marrow that he had sinned against the sacred.
This kind of public repulsing of a high-level assault on our fundamental values is necessary so that commitment to them can reverberate around the country, letting all, especially the young, be imprinted with that commitment.
Unlike the Press ban and its euphemistic alter egos, which are essentially connected to the personal weal, such a response is umbilically-corded to the common weal.
That it has not happened is definitely worse than Worrell’s pernicious decision.
Perturbingly, too, the Minister of Finance even joined wrong-headed others who evidenced the clearly widespread immaturity – or apathy – about democracy here in framing the matter as something between the Governor of the Central Bank and THE NATION newspaper, talking about the need for them to get together to “mend fences”.
What is wrong with us? Once it concerns comprehensively consequential communal values it can’t be between the “warring” parties – any more than that race talk up north should be about Donald Sterling and Magic Johnson getting together and “settling” the matter.
In Bermuda, the president and the board of the Chamber of Commerce did not take the executive director’s verbal attack on the protesting workers as something between the two parties, but as a showdown between the woman and important communal ideals. She had to be made to publicly lose that battle.
But here, nobody with the requisite power – not the Prime Minister, not the Minister of Finance – has delivered the necessary flint-faced reproach or action against Worrell.
All o’ wunna up there better be careful wunna don’t end up crafting an adjusted version of Martin Niemöller’s lament about silence as Hitler and Nazism ravaged on: “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a socialist. Then . . . because . . . . Then . . . because . . . . Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak for me.”
Yours might go something like this: “First they came for THE NATION and I [the political directorate] did nothing – because they did not always get it exactly right in matters concerning me and, at any rate, I felt the paper was biased against me . . . . . Then they came for VOB and I did nothing – for similar reasons . . . . Then they came for the Advocate and I did nothing – because I thought, ‘Who cares? The circulation is inconsequential’ . . . .
“Then people in military gear came for Parliament at the same time that their colleagues were taking over the Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation – and the people did not rise up because I had been complicit in the erosion of their commitment to democratic ideals.”
It is one thing to use withdrawn patronage or legitimate demands for retraction, correction or monetary compensation to hold the Press to its lofty calling of accuracy, legality, fairness, balance and good taste. It’s another thing for officials on the public purse to ban journalists from their public accountability meetings.
And quite another (far more perilous) thing for leaders of a democracy to let them get away with it.
Worrell false-stepped horribly. But the guardians, by their dereliction – failure to deliver a grim rebuff – have made his awful footsteps surer. And even more imperilling.
• Sherwyn Walters is a writer who became a teacher, a song analyst, a broadcaster and an editor.