Walters makes his case for leadership of DLP

By Emmanuel Joseph One of the men challenging the Democratic Labour Party (DLP) president Dr Ronnie Yearwood has publicly expressed a lack of support for the direction of the party under his leadership. Third vice-president Ryan Walters, who along with DLP veteran Richard Sealy will oppose Yearwood in elections at the party’s annual general conference next month, says the DLP has been grabbing news headlines but not doing enough to rebuild. Furthermore, he said, some members were being sidelined. Making his case during VOB’s Down To Brass Tacks call-in radio programme on Thursday, Walters claimed that while the DLP has been doing a good job at times in keeping the Government accountable, it was not functioning in the best interest of members, especially the new ones. “We need a functioning organisation, one that is taking care of its members, one that understands and respects the ability and the potential of its membership…one that is so structured, that when new members come they are not turned off, that they hit the ground running, they can participate; and that is how I see my contribution here in terms of the rebuilding of the party,” the DLP executive member asserted. “We can challenge the Government and we can do it in a structured way, but we have to be a force to be reckoned with. We have to fix our people, we have to take care of our people, we have to build our branches, we have to re-energise them, we have to motivate people….and I think that is where the gap is.” While questioning whether Barbados needed an opposition party or an alternative government, Walters said his interest and focus was on getting the DLP in a state where it can address the issues which the Mia Mottley-led administration had failed to resolve on the people’s behalf, rather than just highlighting them. He said that while the party has been highlighting the issues of the day and attracting headlines since 2018, “my pet peeve is that not enough focus is being done to fix the party itself”. “The membership is rich in experience, intelligence, and knowledge. I want to be part of the leadership that is tapping into all of what I call untapped potential right now. I cannot get that feeling….I don’t want to go deep into it…with the direction that the party has been going in recent years,” he said. Acknowledging that there has to be a cooling-off period for those affected by the two consecutive general election defeats in 2018 and 2022, Walters suggested the party do more to bring disenchanted members back into the fold. “I received a message from a member. The message said ‘I feel under-utilised and marginalised’. That is the real concern, and I know that is not an isolated occurrence. My thing is, yes, we need to challenge the government and we can do that. We have proven that we can do that, but we more so [have] to make sure that we have a functioning organisation and that the content that is coming out of that is representative of the body of the party, and that the individual branches are functioning, are re-energised, they are mobilised,” he told the radio audience. “We have a situation today where we had an election one year ago but have you seen any of the 25 candidates that ran, new candidates that ran in the last election? Have you heard about them? These are guys that stepped up to the plate when the party was at its lowest; when everybody was saying we can’t win a seat again and we don’t have a leader. You heard it all. They stepped up, but where are they today?” Walters further queried. He challenged the leadership of the 68-year-old political institution to show tangible proof that the membership had improved, after having boasted that numbers were growing. In response to a question from the moderator about whether membership was, in fact growing, Walters said that it has been consistently increasing, there was a level of “dormancy”. He made reference to a caller who said they had not participated in the party’s voting process since 2013 as an example of that. Walters said he was concerned about the public perception that the DLP was divided, particularly in light of the decision by him and others to challenge Dr Yearwood instead of supporting him. “To explain is to expose. I believe the democratic process will play out,” said Walters, who was the DLP’s St Michael North West candidate in the 2022 general elections. Repeated efforts to reach Yearwood for comment were unsuccessful. In an assessment of Walters and Sealy as candidates, pollster Peter Wickham told Barbados TODAY: “Ryan Walters has the benefit of being new and fresh, but I also wonder whether someone with the experience of Richard Sealy might not be good for the Democratic Labour Party at this time. I mean, it is not definitive to say whether one person could win over the other. “The last occasion I said ‘yes, Ronnie’. But what I think is happening, clearly, is something that requires a bit of analysis. The Democratic Labour Party is struggling under these new faces because they can’t seem to marshall the forces in the party together, [and] they can’t seem to make decisions in terms of candidate selection,” Wickham contended. He believes that unless the DLP can do that, they will be spinning top in mud. Meanwhile, Barbados TODAY reached out to General Secretary of the DLP Steve Blackett regarding a poll that is making the rounds on social media, asking the voting population who they think is the best person to lead the DLP, how they rate the current leader, who is the strongest challenger to oppose Prime Minister Mia Mottley, and whether they prefer the old or young guard. However, Blackett distanced the party from that survey. “This has nothing to do with the Democratic Labour Party. This is not from the DLP. I don’t know who is behind it,” he said. emmanueljoseph@barbadostoday.bb]]>