AMERICAN RELIGIOUS minister, political leader and former presidential candidate Jesse Jackson at an address to the Democratic National Conference in 1984 is quoted in reference to his Democratic Party as saying: “We are not perfect people. Yet we are called to a perfect mission: our mission, to feed the hungry; to clothe the naked; to house the homeless; to teach the illiterate; to provide jobs for the jobless; and to choose the human race over the nuclear race.”
This quote came to mind while listening to the recent contributions of the Opposition Barbados Labour Party (BLP) during debate on the 2010 Financial Statement and Budgetary Proposals. Some of the speakers appeared to be caught in a time warp where the period 1994-2008 and the effect of the social mismanagement of those 14 years seemed to be forgotten by the Opposition spokespersons.
At no stage did any of the Opposition contributors touch on the BLP’s failure to restructure the economy during a period of so-called “plenty”.
None of the BLP spin doctors sought the public’s pardon for the $60 million financial holocaust known
as Greenland. Nor did former Prime Minister Owen Arthur seek to explain why only marginal farming land was made available for locals in the Land For The Landless programme, while some of the country’s prime properties ended up in the hands of people with strange titles from countries with exotic names.
The minimal attention paid to the society and social needs offers an explanation as to why housing initiatives by then Minister of Housing Liz Thompson never got off the ground; why agricultural development never got past the pretty speeches made in the Senate by Minister of Agriculture Erskine Griffith; why the complaints from within important agencies such as the Royal Barbados Police Force frequently fell on the deaf ears of successive Attorneys-General Mia Mottley and Dale Marshall; why the efforts of the Auditor General to clean up financial practices in Government for the benefit of the wider society were constantly ignored by the BLP administration.
What has set the Democratic Labour Party’s (DLP) style of governance apart from the BLP’s has been that the former has always placed social policy at the heart of its politics. The maxim that Barbados is a society and not just an economy was not born out of any diminution of the importance of the economy.
Spin doctors in the Opposition have sought to stress the obvious that the society and economy are inextricably meshed, as though the DLP had ever in its history of existence ignored the importance of the economy while admirably focusing attention on its citizenry, especially the most vulnerable.
Jackson’s words resonated because they bore correlation to the focus which the DLP has always placed on education, as exemplified by the introduction of free education. The introduction of free bus fares and free summer camps for schoolchildren as strategies to ease the pressure on the most vulnerable in society fit into the concept of social engineering.
It is ironic that the ousting of Mottley as Opposition Leader – clearly at this stage possessed of more to offer the BLP than Arthur – falls smack into the general belief that the BLP still has not learnt the lesson that people are more than statistics to be manipulated. A lot of collateral damage was done to Barbados between 1994 and 2008, and the DLP administration has no option but to make it right.
• Douglas Leopold Phillips is a pseudonym for the Democratic Labour Party.
