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UPP chairman on mission to gain electorate’s confidence

by Sandy Deane
3 min read
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The man who has taken over as chairman of the United Progressive Party (UPP) has suggested that citizens are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with Government’s handling of several issues, and he’s hoping this will encourage them to consider the five-year-old party as a viable alternative.

Wayne Griffith, who was elected at the party’s annual general meeting over the weekend, told Barbados TODAY that although third parties feature little on the Barbadian political landscape, the UPP is ready to rise to the challenge.

“Our real mandate is to develop sound policies and to figure out how we are going to turn around enough votes that we can be a better force in the next election. We all understand how Barbadians feel about a third political entity. We are actually challenged and we believe as a team that we can get together over the next few months and come up with strategies to let people understand what the UPP is about and what our philosophy is and how it suits Barbados into the future,” he said.

In fact, Griffith who took over from Everton Holligan, signalled that the first order of business is organizing the party internally, suggesting that the general elections, constitutionally due in 2023, may “just be around the corner”.

“We are going to make some strides in our policy development and our external communications. We need to improve on that and also with COVID in mind and the pandemic still around us, we have to become more innovative in the way that we plan to communicate with our constituents and people in Barbados in general, so that is where our focus will lie,” he said.

Griffith said the UPP is particularly concerned about the state of the economy and pointed to the first-quarter Barbados Statistical Service Continuous Household Labour Force Survey which indicated that 22 000 Barbadians are unemployed.

He raised questions about the figure and suggested that Government should allocate more resources to assist Barbadians struggling to cope in the current economic slump.

“We in the UPP believe it must be much more than that because there are so many people who work in the informal sector, a lot of home-based businesses who have not been counted in the statistics,” Griffith said.

“Government first needs to look at who is actually unemployed and look at their home situation; that is a better procedure. But also, all the loans that the Government has been getting recently, we want to see more of it being spent on improving the lives of Barbadians at this time.”

Following Saturday’s AGM, Holligan will serve as deputy chairman, Raquel Gilkes as general secretary, Ambrose Carter as chief financial officer, and Rhea Gilkes as public relations officer.

Griffith said the party is made of dynamic individuals and there are already a number of persons offering to join the party.

“We have a number of people who have expressed interest and I hope that by the first quarter of next year that we will have more than half of those positions filled,” he said.
(SD)

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