Last week, in my attempt to highlight the obvious but thus far unaddressed problems facing the Opposition Barbados Labour Party, my main conclusion was that, “the uncomfortable truth for Mia Mottley is that her party’s success resides neither in less or more public activity, but in resolving the leadership question within her party”.
As is expected when uncomfortable truths are raised in a context of deep factionalism, the response from the Owen Arthur faction of the BLP on facebook was to attribute pro-Mottley and anti-Arthur motives to my article.
One particularly caustic response accused me of being a “very enthusiastic Mottley fan boy”, and linked the article to efforts to “destroy Owen’s reputation and the public’s perception of his ability and integrity”.
The crescendo was started by a mischievous post which claimed that “it appears as if he is saying one of the answers to the problem is to get rid of Owen”.
I reject emphatically any narrow partisan motive in my article of May 27, nor do I ever leave my assertions open to conjecture.
I maintain that one of the reasons, among others, that Mia Mottley has had difficult leadership runs (previously and presently) is the constant signalling by word and deed by the former Prime Minister and party leader Owen Arthur, who is a sitting MP, of his unwillingness to subject himself to her leadership.
In this regard the Facebook response attributed to Lynette Eastmond seems to have come closest to capturing the central challenges to Mottley’s leadership.
According to Eastmond, “all of us who aspire to any kind of leadership whatsoever must recognise that if we are not recognised as a leader we have to suck it in and admit it”.
The problem with Eastmond’s position, however, is that it attributes an “objective” explanation to Mottley’s “failure to be recognised as a leader” and ignores the “subjective” reality of deliberate opposition to her as part of the problem.
In other words, we are faced with a classic self-fulfilling prophecy: “I oppose your leadership and therefore you are no leader.”
Eastmond, however, despite the anti-Mottley undertone, does identify a central problem facing Mottley. The opposition to her leadership is a fact.
One can think of no other Caribbean political leader who has on a previous occasion had her leadership taken from her by a former Prime Minister, and after reclaiming the leadership, is faced with the open opposition from that Prime Minister and his followers.
Eastmond, like my May 27 article, was calling for a resolution of the leadership issue, without which there may be no forward movement.
By way of advice therefore, as long as Mottley remains leader, the opposition will persist. Perhaps the time has come for Mottley to negotiate away her leadership, and allow the party to settle around an “uncontested”, “recognised” leader.
• Tennyson Joseph is a political scientist at the University of the West Indies Cave Hill Campus, specialising in regional affairs.