#BTSpeakingOut – Management by walking around

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the author(s) do not represent the official position of Barbados TODAY.

by Michael Rudder

Yes, both local major political parties have skeletons in their closets, as it were, whether it’s Four (Six?) Seasons or Freedom Park. Both those expenditures, plus many other projects, were undertaken with the people’s money. Ego or frivolities have got to stop.

I trust that the new government will properly deal with the backlog of “festering social and geographic sores” before aberrant spending of the shiny new penny of election victory on another frivolity or ego trip.

Priority number one, it seems to me, has to be the nation’s health, hence the Queen Elizabeth Hospital – in future probably just referred to as the QEH – and nurses in general.

The problem of late to very late payment of nurses’ salary has been with us for far, far too long.
I was speaking a few days ago to a nurse who had been trained in England many years previous and had come back home in the eighties to offer service.

She let me know that she would often not be paid for four months or more at a time.

The late payments in that department of health and other departments such as some prison staff, Island Constables et al, are obviously systemic problems as much as is the dust from the Arawak Cement Plant.

The time for fixing these and similar problems is long past. Get the problems solved in 2022. And we add the absolutely necessary appropriate supplies must be made available to the institutions and these must be systematically maintained.

It is not enough to have an MBWA orgy every time an election bell is rung. In every Ministry – Ministers, who may also have a constituency, as well as the managers of that ministry, for instance Permanent Secretaries and others, Heads of State Enterprises and ‘section chiefs’ all need to continuously practise MBWA.

This “Management By Walking Around” can bring those who should be making things happen closer to the needs. Get out of your “comfort or what’s app zones.”

Walk, listen, learn and take action. We cannot go on sliding down one slope and then another just to have to start over.

In any event starting over and going down the same road will no longer be an option as earth changes are here.

We need to do things differently.