Stuart says former DLP administration has nothing to be ashamed about

Former Prime Minister Freundel Stuart broke his three-year political silence on Monday night to deliver a fiery defence of his administration’s decade-long handling of the country’s affairs, saying it had nothing to be ashamed about.

In fact, he said the 2008 to 2018 period of the Democratic Labour Party’s (DLP) rule was “glorious”.

Immovable in that position, Stuart, who led his party to a 30-nil defeat in the 2018 general elections, staunchly defended his track record as Prime Minister, saying he led a government that kept Barbados’ economy going even in the midst of one of the worst financial crises.

“Nobody in Barbados or outside of Barbados can get Freundel Jerome Stuart to feel ashamed about what happened between 2008 and 2018. It was a glorious period,” he said at the DLP’s St Michael South spot meeting.

“Owen Arthur sat next to me – or rather, between David Thompson [then Prime Minister] and me – at Holy Trinity Anglican Church at Hutson Linton’s funeral … and turned to both of us and said, ‘you all are going to have a very rough time; this was a very good election for me to lose because of how oil prices were going, and, of course, the global financial crisis had set in’.

“We managed it. Children continued to go to school, housewives could still go to the supermarket and get what they wanted. We kept unemployment down to between nine and ten per cent, we paid all of our foreign debts, public servants were paid every single month on time – public servants including nurses. Public transport ran; when we did not want to spend foreign exchange on buying trucks for the Sanitation Service Authority, we employed local waste haulers to supplement what was happening at the Sanitation Service Authority. That is what we did,” an unapologetic Stuart added.

The former DLP leader admitted that the Barbados Labour Party (BLP) administration’s narrative of the country accumulating more foreign reserves and seeing no economic downgrades from international rating agencies under their watch is, on the surface, impressive.

However, he said the International Monetary Fund (IMF)-financed Economic Recovery and Transformation (BERT) plan, in conjunction with the large amounts of loans over the BLP’s three-year rule, was giving citizens a false sense of security which will fall apart when the debts are up for payment.

“No government of Barbados, since Independence or before Independence, has borrowed more money than the present Barbados Labour Party has borrowed over the past three years….,” he charged.

“They [IMF] have not come here to be any do-gooders, they are lenders of money and they must get it back. That is what we are going to have to deal with in Barbados when the time comes. If a country is in an IMF programme, no rating agency, I don’t care where it comes from – Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s, any of the others – no rating agency will go into that country and downgrade its credit rating, because that will be another way of saying that the IMF does not know what it is doing.”

Stuart charged that the current government has betrayed the island politically and engaged in spectator sports during its current campaign, at a time when the country still faces one of its most daunting economic periods.

He said given that elections have been called 18 months before they were constitutionally due, Barbadians have a right and responsibility to vote and keep the BLP in check.

“You are the worse off in Barbados tonight, the rule of law is under threat in Barbados tonight, as a result of the vandalism of the Barbados Labour Party. It started in June 2018 at the opening of Parliament, and the slide right down has continued…. We are on Gadarene slopes, sliding downwards.

“There is no beast anywhere more dangerous than a man or woman who has power when that power is answerable only to that person’s prejudice, that person’s caprice, that person’s whims, or that person’s rage. That is the threat that faces Barbados tonight,” Stuart insisted. (SB)