#BTColumn – The state of Barbadian democracy

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

by Ralph Jemmott

No analysis of any aspect of Caribbean life can escape the centrality of Politics, for in the region, politics is everything and everything is politics. Political governance is importance because in the West Indies governments not only control and dispense a significant portion of the country’s resources, but they play a critical role in ordering society.

In addition people look to politicians to solve almost all the problems they confront. A very old calypso by the Mighty Sparrow sang of a Trinidadian woman by the name of Dorothy who “when she lost she man, she went to complain to Dr. William,” Dr. Eric Williams being the then Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago.

A rather volatile very regular caller to Brass Tacks boisterously proclaimed that Barbados is not a “democracy”. Moderator Dr. Kristina Hinds reminded him that if Barbados was not a democracy but an autocracy he might not be able to say the things he does so openly.

Truth be told Barbados remains by all indices a reasonably stable liberal democratic polity. To a large degree it satisfied most of the requirement of a democratic state, for which we can all be grateful.

We conduct reasonably free and fair election every five years or fewer, with peaceful transfers of power when the people chose to change their government.

For all its claims to democracy in America an outgoing President of the United States, in cahoots with a corrupting Republican Party sought to disrupt the peaceful transfer of government after Donald Trump’s election loss in 2020. This has never happened in Barbados.

There is reasonable freedom of speech and of the Press. I don’t know that there are any political prisoners or ‘prisoners of conscience’ in the  Dodds Penitentiary. Of course freedom is not absolute, no one is totally free to do what he or she chooses to do.

Understandably in Barbados the laws governing libel and slander are very strict. This has forced sections of the Press in Barbados to ‘play it safe’ and to resort to what seems an uncomfortable and less than commendable level of self-censorship.

Again to an appreciable degree Barbados has been able, generally speaking to maintain a high level of independence between the three arms of government, the Executive, the Legislature and the Judiciary. The separation of powers is regarded in liberal democratic thought and praxis as a fundamental cornerstone of good governance.

Since the Mia Mottley-led Barbados Labour Party won two successive 30 to 0 victories, persons have raised the spectre of Barbados becoming an authoritarian state. The fear is ill-founded but based on three factors.

The first is that with its absolute majority and the absence of an official Opposition in the House of Assembly Barbados could be considered a de facto one party state. The second is that the government has taken at least three decisions with comparatively little consultation.

One is the declaration of Republican status without a plebiscite of any kind and before the fashioning of a new Republican constitution. The other was the removal of the Nelson statue and the third was the declaration of Robyn ‘Rihanna’ Fenty as a National Heroine. The two latter were arguably of little national import, but collectively they raised some concern about our country’s future governance.   

Political parties even in observably democratic polities have a feral instinct for their own survival. They sometimes coalesce even against the people they claim to represent. In spite of the claims to ‘love the people’ they more often than not show a preeminent concern with holding on to power and the perquisites of that power.

We have seen that in the United States, the ostensible securities of Jeffersonian democracy can be effectively threatened by one ill qualified man and one ethically bankrupt party that had little regard for the democratic process or for political morality.

Truth be told a liberal democracy is only sustainable to the extent that the citizen is prepared to defend it. This itself depends on the political moral quotient of the people. In today’s world moral suasion by itself is unlikely to sustain a working democracy. People generally lack the ethical stamina to take a stand if it means the sacrifice of their material self-interest.

Political apathy also inhibits the conscience and the citizen becomes increasingly reliance on governments that over-promise but consistently under-perform. This is not because they are bad but because even as they promise to ‘transform’ they function within circumscribing structures and conditions that inhibit bold choices.

Invariably conditions reflect exogenous factors out of their control such as the rising cost of living. Recently President Biden facing rising inflation and mid-term elections that could go against the Democrats, noted that you can’t lower inflation simply by “twitching a switch”. The struggle continues.

Ralph Jemmott is a retired educator and regular contributor on social issues.