I would have won the money! Had I taken the bet with my neighbor, I would have won. When on Monday I saw the newspaper headline “A Mess” and Owen Arthur was on the back foot talking about the Pierhead Project and the functioning of the Barbados economy, I said to my neighbor, “First, there must be another side to that story that we, the public, need to hear about’. Second, I told him, ‘watch out for Mia Mottley. She is bound to lash back with an even more sensational and alarming headline’.
Now having worked in the newspaper industry for many years, I know the person quoted in the article does not have a say in determining the headline, but, in this business, an experienced operator can use adjectives and superlatives to influence the type of headline he or she wishes.
So once again this past week we have seen the battle for headlines intensifying between Arthur and Mottley, with little Dale Marshall putting in his two cents worth. The International Monetary Fund said in Saturday’s press, interestingly not worthy of headline status, that moderate growth could be expected next year. It blamed the current squeeze on the global economic crisis but maintained full support for the Government’s short and Medium Term Fiscal Strategy.
Clearly, this was not what the opposition operatives wanted to hear, so they proceeded to create their own economic horizon. Arthur took the new ball and sought to deflect the general discussion by raising a red flag about the Pierhead Marina Project. According to him, Barbadians could find themselves facing increased taxation to pay for the Pierhead Marina Project, which he said is now costing somewhere in the region of 627 million dollars. This financing problem, he said, was just a tip of the iceberg. He said also “a properly conceived project” under his administration had been “perverted” by the DLP administration.
Now this writer did his research, and after studying the file, has advised that an appropriate response to Arthur on this subject be reserved for a Haggatt Hall-type ‘tell all forum’ where the sheer magic of Arthur’s economic wizardry can be exposed, once again. What I would say on this occasion is that the file is large and the familiar names associated with Arthur and several very interesting financial transactions of the past administration, are once again in play. My advice to readers is to place Monday’s newspapers in safe keeping, for you shall need them down the road when the version of the Pierhead Project story that Arthur forgot to tell, is revealed. The audio of Arthur’s St. Andrew speech has been placed in the 2013 Election docket, as Exhibit Number Two. Exhibit Number One, you would imagine, is Arthur’s frank assessment of Mottley’s leadership qualities as outlined in that now infamous Cave Hill Campus press briefing.
But on Monday we had Arthur from the top end, painting one of his now familiar doomsday images of Barbados’ economy now and in the foreseeable future. Again he chastised the government for investing in social programmes such as constituency councils, on which to date, less than three million dollars have been spent, free bus rides for school children and holiday camps, which again, cost less than half a per cent of total government spending.
When I saw this line of attack, I said to my neighbor, ‘watch out’, Mia Mottley will back raise him in terms of the color of his language. Thus, I was not surprised Tuesday morning, when the headline said it all “Mia: More Hard Times”. But she didn’t say that and stop, she went on: “what is going to have to come down in this country in the next six to twelve months is going to be so gruesome in terms of adjustment that government as we have come to know it, will not be able to remain the same as we go into the future”. And if that was not enough, she then went into overdrive “free health care is going to be at risk. Free tertiary education, low bus fares and subsidized housing under the National Housing Corporation framework are at risk”. This was Mia Mottley, intent on not being upstaged by Arthur as they go down the back straight to next month’s annual party conference.
The little fellow Dale Marshall, reading all this on Monday and Tuesday, decided in Wednesday’s press he did not want to be forgotten so he jumped in the fray by proclaiming that government is on a go slow and the country is on auto pilot. Poor fellow, he is running a distant third.
All this gloom and doom would be abstract and irrelevant, were it not coming from persons who, by virtue of the current and previous offices they occupied, are taken seriously by international observers and investors. This seasonal diet of economic doomsday forecasts is most unbecoming of persons who wish someday to be at the helm of leadership in this country. Every economic quarter, we are told, could be our last as a nation. All the popular adjectives have been exhausted and now they are repeating themselves. Things are bad, things are awful, the country is in a mess, we are in the middle of a crisis, collapse is not far off and the lamentations continue. Yet, the International Monetary Fund is saying we have turned the corner and there should be up to two per cent growth next year.
Furthermore, Barbadians are travelling. They are communicating with friends and family abroad. They monitor scenes of economic ravages in nearby islands. They know that while circumstances are difficult and indeed challenging in Barbados, worse exists elsewhere.
For two and a half years the contenders for leadership of the BLP have been unrelenting in their use of adjectives to describe the economic plight of the country. No adjective has been too strong. Clearly the message they are sending is if they are not running the country, then the country cannot and should not be run.
Furthermore, it is interesting that in a billion dollar economy, the first and only areas with which they have a difficulty and which they insist should be slashed are those handful of social projects that impact and affect the most vulnerable and most deserving in our community. This essentially is where the two leading political parties in Barbados differ philosophically. One believes Barbados is nothing but an economy the other insist there is more, much more to Barbados, than an economy.
My friend, the time will come for you to decide which party to keep and which party to put out to pasture, for a long, long time!
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