#BTColumn – Winninng on the merits

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

by Ralph Jemmott

In calling the January 19, 2022 General Election a year and a half before it was constitutionally due, Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley took her case to the court of public opinion.

The jury of our peers handed down a unanimous verdict in her favour based on the merits of the case she and her party presented. That case against Miss Mottley was not helped by a corps of neophyte prosecutors who were either ill qualified, had not studied or did not fully comprehended the brief.

Some of the team of litigants opposing Miss Mottley did not even look like lawyers, certainly not like products of the Inns of Court or the Sir Hugh Wooding Law School.
Miss Mottley herself could mount a winning case that was enough to convince the thirty member jury.

The verdict was once again unanimous. The truth was that in the face of severe challenges, her government did respond actively and performed creditably.

1. It made the substantive case that it inherited the very adverse circumstance of an economy in virtual ruin. On that front among other things, she could legitimately claim for example that an international credit rating that stood at CCC+ in 2018 stands at – in 2022.

The persistent downgrades before 2018 have ostensibly been halted. The arrears to Barbadians in relation to tax refunds and trade payables owed to them have been reduced from BDS$1,900 million to $63 million over the same period.
We are by no means out of the proverbial woods but the slide has been halted.

2. Miss Mottley could and did with rational argument contend that adverse events contrived to make a bad inheritance significantly worse.
Hurricane Elsa, the eruption of the volcano in St. Vincent and the subsequent ash-fall all made claims on the government’s attention both financial and administrative.

3. In spite of the financial difficulties, new garbage trucks and new buses have arrived. My own garbage is collected every Wednesday morning like clockwork and commuters no longer have to wait hours in the bus terminals to get to their workplaces and get back home. The roads are being slowly but surely repaired.

4. Chief among these adversities would be the onset of a global pandemic which countries far better off than Barbados struggled to manage.
The establishment of the Best-dos Santos and Harrison Point facilities and the refitting of the Blackman –Gollop complex were recognised accomplishments.

5. Perhaps the biggest case the BLP was able to make in its defence was the quality of its leadership. Whether you like her or not and I have some misgivings, Mia Mottley is a leader, exhibiting the kind of leadership ability that one has to be born with.

One tries not to get too caught up in the cult of political personality, but give Jack his jacket and give Mia her scarf.

The government could and did contend that given the unseen events that overtook the administration, the BLP did manfully try to manage both the economic and social consequences of a universal plague which no country fully understood its character and knew with any degree of certitude how to control it. In England on the 21 January 2022 according to the Daily Telegraph, that country was recording an average of 200 deaths per day.

If as I have argued the Miss Mottley and the BLP won on the merits, then the DLP can be said to have lost on the demerits. Errol Barrow and the Democratic Labour Party were a tremendous force for good between 1961 and 1987.

Once he was off the scene the DLP was never quite the same. Perhaps it was that all roads led too much to one man. Internal dissension, naked opportunism, weak leadership and the absence of a coherent  philosophy led to decline.

The party attracted too many persons who did not believe in anything. The decay in the physical condition of the George Street Headquarters was a metaphor for its internal condition. Astor B. Watts, a true believer, must be in tears.

The ten years 2008 to 2018 were a disaster. Not to accept that fact is to be delusional. It is shameful how after the 2018 thirty to nothing defeat, the defeated candidates on its side failed to rally to the DLP defence to at least try to salvage the wreckage. For a while most of them seemed to have disappeared from view.

Credit must be given to Ms. Verla Depeiza for a forlorn attempt at rescue but the rot was too deep and she failed to gather the required support. The Rev Guy Hewitt once he did not win the Presidency fled the scene. Saving the soul of a nation requires tenacity of purpose. Any right thinking Barbadian would want to see a revival of the Democratic Labour Party for itself and in defence of a viable two party democracy for Barbados.

It will be a long road back for the DLP. Right now there seems to be no silver lining behind the dark cloud that is the DLP. What it needs first of all is the ability to attract and retain persons of goodwill and intellect who can hold the public’s attention.

It is also desperately in search of a national leader who can galvanise the mass of supporters who must still be out there somewhere.

The data suggests that in spite of winning no seats the DLP garnered almost 30 per cent of the votes. After all, it used to be said that Barbados was Barrow country, but alas the Right

Excellent Errol Walton Barrow is no longer with us. Does his spirit really live on in those who call his name?

Ralph Jemmott is a respected retired educator.