Stop the blame game, DLP tells PM

The Democratic Labour Party (DLP) has called on Prime Minister Mia Mottley to stop the blame game and buckle down to the task of administering the affairs of the country.

The call has come in the wake of what the DLP said was the Prime Minister’s attribution of the rise in crime to what she terms the DLP’s failure to invest financially in the youth.

“After nine months in office, it is time for the Mottley administration to get on with the job they were elected to do instead of apportioning blame to the former Government whenever solutions evade them,” the DLP said in a statement from its General Secretary Guyson Mayers.

According to the DLP police statistics show that crime in Barbados was on a downward trend for the years 2017 and 2018.

The DLP was voted out of office in May 2018.

“Murders were down by four, robberies by two, aggravated burglaries by seven and other crimes showed a decrease of three per cent over 2017,” the DLP said.

“Conversely by February of this year we were turning to the army and prayer for solutions after a rise in murders in the month of January equaled the total number of murders for the first four months of 2018.”

The DLP asserted that it was proud of its record with youth initiatives, many of which the current Government condemned and criticized in Opposition and found the first opportunity to abandon as soon as they came to office.

The DLP also highlighted some of its achievements while in office. These include the amount spent in Youth and Community Development projects, and the amount spent in the Education Ministry.

The DLP listed community technology programmes at Community Centres across the island; refurbished Community Centres left derelict by the Barbados Labour Party; the Community Dance Fest which explored the hip hop street dance potential of at risk teens; the David Thompson Memorial Football Classic which ensured the young male players from every parish in the country received a stipend during participation; the establishment of a modern facility for students having difficulty in the secondary school system; summer camps and the mainstreaming of technical and vocational studies within the formal school curriculum as just a few of the myriad initiatives introduced to assist in addressing some of the root issues encountered with the youth.

The DLP called on PM Mottley and her team to abandon “the empty carping” and seek to grapple with the root causes of the societal issues facing the island in a mature manner.