Barbados has been reduced to a comedy of errors by a Freundel Stuart-led administration that lacks relevance. From the head down, there is a deliberate attempt to avoid making contact with anything that has a bearing on or has reference to the matter at hand. The approach is designed to keep Barbadians off-balanced in relation to the seriousness of our current crisis.
There seems to be organised confusion in the Cabinet of Barbados. This lays the foundation for Prime Minister Stuart to go into his archives and dust off some phrases from the past that may have resonance, not in their power but in their playfulness. It is as if Barbados has become the stage from which well-rehearsed words are to be paraded and from which the author derives pleasure, while leaving the audience fully uninformed but impressed.
The lack of relevance has become increasingly the hallmark of the collective voice of ignorance of the Cabinet. This ignorance peaked when the Prime Minister classified a sub-section of his ministers as an eminent group. By the way, the word eminent is associated with distinguished and outstanding achievement. It is therefore puzzling that any current minister can be characterised as such in the face of the abject failure of the Government.
There is no bitterness attached to the following truths. The Minister of Finance is easily the most [unsuccessful] finance minister in our country’s history. The Minister of Tourism ranks at the bottom of the ladder of achievement over the last four decades. And certainly, Prime Minister is the least impressive of this country’s leaders. These are truths that are easily supported by evidence.
It must not be forgotten that the Prime Minister and his ministers promised the public servants less than a year ago that not one job would be lost in the public sector. No amount of grandstanding can deny this fact. No amount of irrelevance can relieve the pain that lay-offs will bring to those affected and their families. And no amount of delay can restore confidence if there is no evidence of sound and consistent policies.
Our fair land is being compromised by a philosophy of irrelevance. The serious issues are being swept under the carpet while the folly is clothed in “Sunday go to meetings” and displayed on the Cabinet Broadcasting Corporation and elsewhere. There is a gathering of economic and political errors that has undermined not only the economic confidence of Barbados but the social comfort of Barbadians.
The lack of relevance threatens the institutions that gave birth to the Social Partnership that was used to counter the obstacles to our progress in the early 1990s. The partnership has not been meeting on a regular basis, if at all. Perhaps, this reflects the division between certain elements of the labour movement and the ministry responsible for labour.
In fact, the leadership of the labour has delivered its departure way in advance. This speaks to the broad mental condition of the country, when in the throes of an economic crisis that has morphed into a political crisis, the workers’ representatives have announced their lack of appetite for the challenges ahead.
Unlike an economic crisis in which the indicators are measurable, the elements of the political crisis are more qualitative in nature. The latter reflects the leadership’s claims to legitimacy, its relationship with the followers and the context in which it rose to power. No one can question the current leadership’s claim to legitimacy given our form of rational-legal authority that is “based on a free, open competition in which merit alone is deemed to matter”.
The two other aspects of political leadership are inter-related. The context in which the current leadership rose to power brings into question the nature of the political crisis. On sober reflection, it must be concluded that the current administration did its best to avoid engaging in the obvious and serious issues confronting the Barbadian electorate prior to the last general election. The strategy worked.
Less than six months after the election, the very issues that were avoided came to dominate the economic landscape with the obvious political consequences. It is not enough to put the emphasis on form rather than content in responding to the people’s concerns in this time of crisis. The emphasis has to be on the failure to deliver the goods.
The political crisis therefore comes when the relationship with the people and the context in which power was gained collide.
Clyde Mascoll is an economist and Opposition Barbados Labour Party adviser on the economy. Email [email protected]
