Oh Barbados! This is our season of affliction and lamentation!
In the words of our national poet, Kamau Brathwaite:-
“Ev’ry day you see the sun Rise, the sun Set; God sen’ ev’ry month A new moon. Dry season Follow wet season again An’ the green crop follow the rain An’ then suddenly so Widdout rhyme Widdout reason You crops start to die You can’t even see the sun in the sky;
An’ suddenly so, without rhyme, Without reason, all you hope gone Ev’rything look like it comin’ out wrong.
Why is that? What it mean?”
What does it mean when the conventional wisdom of all the supposedly great economic gurus is proven to be mere folly, and the world plunges into a recession that grabs a still dependent Barbados by its throat?
Why is it that young men born and bred in Barbados can show themselves capable of wantonly and callously causing the deaths of six of their young Barbadian sisters?
What does it mean when naked greed, ambition and arrogance can so dominate our social life that not even a venerable 70-year-old political party is spared the ravaging and demoralising effects of a blind pursuit of narrow self-interest?
But most of all, why did our 48-year-old Prime Minister, in the full bloom of his maturity and intellectual powers, have to die – so sudden, so young, without rhyme, without reason!
Truly, this is the dark time – a period in which it seems that we will be tested as a nation and profound questions will be posed to us.
But in the midst of the darkness, there are several points of light, evidence of something good and strong within the national character!
We see, for example, a young widow and her three beautiful daughters bearing their loss and the tremendous crush of national scrutiny with exemplary dignity and grace.
We witness selfless citizens joining together to memorialise our nation’s six newest martyrs, and pledging themselves to work for Barbados in such a way that what happened on September 3 will never happen again.
We see an acting Prime Minister negotiating the succession process in a thoroughly democratic manner, with transparency and constitutional rectitude. Surely, congratulations are in order for new Prime Minister Freundel Stuart for giving Barbadians, including Sir Lloyd Erskine Sandiford, a lesson in democracy and constitutional correctness!
We see a people mourning for their fallen leader with fortitude, dignity, graciousness and profound genuineness of human feeling! Truly, it seems that adversity brings out the best in the Barbadian spirit!
And so, in keeping with this imperishable spirit, we in the Peoples Empowerment Party (PEP) pledge to our fellow citizens that in the midst of darkness the PEP will always be found searching for the points of light.
We believe in Barbados and in the Barbadian people, and are imbued with the confidence that Barbados and its fellow Caribbean nations possess all the resources required to solve their problems and to establish a civilisation that will amaze the world.
Again, Kamau Brathwaite speaks for us:- “let my children rise in the path of the morning up and go forth on the road of the morning run through the fields in the sun of the morning, see the rainbow of Heaven:God’s curved mourning calling.”
