#BTColumn – What about substance behind sound?

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

by Dr Ronnie Yearwood

Bravo to another excellent speech by Prime Minister Mottley at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) that just concluded in Glasgow.

We expect nothing less. I think for a country that spends more than half a billion dollars on education, I would expect my leaders to be able to present themselves well, in the tradition of Barbadian and Caribbean leadership.

In fact, Barbados and the Caribbean have been pushing the issue of “1.5 to stay alive” since COP 21 at the Paris Summit. Then too, it was a “make or break”, “do or die”, “last chance saloon”. Yet again, world leaders including those from the Caribbean were prostrating at the altar of time.

By COP 27, 28, we may be again at a “make or break”. I guess most of the leaders at COP26 did not see the irony of jet setting half way around the world emitting carbon to pollute the earth to attend a conference to tell their constituents back home about saving the earth.

Maybe Zoom only works for “normal” people. Then those leaders wonder why voters do not believe half of what they say or ignore the direction that they set.

Real leadership would not only have been a nice speech but a demonstration of moral authority. Powerful would have been giving the speech in your country on the climate change front line via Zoom and calling out the climate hypocrites who jetted into Glasgow and rolled out in the SUVs that clogged up the narrow streets of Glasgow, with engines idling for security reasons, to preach to the rest of us. However, the world got, zero for moral authority and zero for climate action.

Once you unpack what the Prime Minister says, disappointment sets in, because as I said in my column last month, there is a gap behind the pretty talk and actual action. Leadership must involve both words and deeds. If we are to incline our hearts to common sense as the Prime Minister so readily tells us, we recognise the gap.

I often find myself smiling wryly once I unpack the Prime Minister’s speeches, not because the delivery of the speeches is not excellent, but because it must take a special personality to live in such glorious contradiction. The cognitive dissonance is real. I guess that happens after so many years in practising old politics.

Let us start with what the Prime Minister said to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour and it always troubles me that these supposedly hard-hitting journalist do not pick up on the contradictions.

The Prime Minister said, “Those who need to make the decisions are kicking the can down the road and they believe that they can because they are not seeing us – they see themselves.”

I almost fell out of my chair because that statement perfectly sums up the Prime Minister’s approach to COVID at this very moment!

I also had to ask, if this is the same Prime Minister who just ignored a whole country in determining the form of republic we will become? Is this the same Prime Minister that talks green energy but her Ambassador Thompson was in the news the same week of COP26 talking up drilling for offshore oil?

Is this the same Prime Minister under whose watch cruise ships anchored during Covid, the anchoring not the issue, but it was so badly managed (a running theme of this government) that the damage to our reefs will take lifetimes to repair?

Is this the same Prime Minister that blames our water management on climate change when research has shown that is not the main issue at this time as such, but it has been poor water management by successive governments? Barbados has one of the lowest ratings for water management across the Caribbean.

Is this the same Prime Minister, who has kicked the can down the road on everything from governance reform, education reform and generally any type of reform on the basis of COVID in one breath, but then in another tells us that we have to live with COVID and get on with life.

I am slightly confused and maybe you are too, or perhaps the Prime Minister is experiencing cognitive dissonance.  What I found most troubling from the Prime Minister’s press conference from Brussels, reporting on COP26, is the very casual way the Prime Minister let us know she was auditioning for a top job in the global community and we would be left with the Minister of Education as acting Prime Minister.

Meanwhile in Barbados, COVID continues unabated and a general sense of unease persists. The Prime Minister said that she may be required to stay on at COP26 or if she returns to Barbados, she may have to go back but she will address that.

Must be nice to be spending time where you don’t have a 9 p.m. curfew! In the meantime, it seems like we will be stuck with the Minister of Education, someone not even up to the task as Minister of Education, as long-term Acting Prime Minister.

I am not sure in what world, you do poorly at one job and in addition to keeping that job, you get to keep trying out for the top job.

It is no secret that many think the Minister of Education is operating outside of her programming capabilities and I have critically unpacked and assessed her policy approaches in this column before.

It appears that we voted for the Prime Minister but got the Minister of Education. If we are talking climate change, can the Acting Prime Minister explain the rate increases that the Barbados Light & Power is trying to seek and how that will hit the economy and households, especially as many of us work from home, so our houses are our offices and our electricity bills are already going through the roof.

Where is the household relief for the residents across Barbados, especially those working from home in traditional middle-class Barbados such as in Husbands, West Terrace, Oxnards and Prior Park? What are the plans to get solar panels on every house in Barbados?

The Prime Minister may think she has to try to save the world, and the issues of climate change are rightly important, but China and Russia did not bother to turn up at COP26, and for all the bravado, the President of the United States is hamstrung by his own party in trying to get his environmental agenda passed in the US Senate.

Bravo speeches at CO26 but us Barbadians also have pressing concerns at the moment. Mia might “care” but what does she care about?

Dr Ronnie Yearwood (yearwood.r.r.f@gmail.com) is an educator, lawyer and social commentator. The views and analysis here are his own and not of any institution or organisation he is affiliated with.