Posted to the 2015 Year in Review blog by Are-we-there-yet.
2015 was, to my mind, the year in which the guard was emphatically passed from the remnants of my parent’s generation to my children’s own. I’ve now fully accepted that 2016 and beyond is not about me or my generation (those of us still surviving are all pensioners with not much more to contribute to the country than the allowances which the Freundal Stuart administration is taking from our meagre pensions) but about how our children and their children’s children will live and survive in this new age of almost incomprehensible technology and likely overweening service to self by those that will lead them.
I therefore think that what is needed in the review of 2015 is the teasing out of the occurrences that will be most influential on their lives in 2016 and beyond. I don’t think the portents are good.
This year has started with a crass attempt by the Freundal Stuart administration to push a project whose main purpose is to perpetuate the hold that the DLP now has on the Government and to implement the elevation of Freundal Stuart to the history books as the father of the future Republic of Barbados to join, according to his own statement, Errol Barrow, the father of Independence and Owen Arthur, the Father of something grand which I can’t even recall.
Errol Barrow made a great contribution to the country outside of leading the fight for Independence and so too did Owen Arthur in economic management in his years at the helm. On the other hand, Freundal Stuart’s administration will go down in history as the worst one we have ever inflicted on ourselves, with Freundal Stuart himself displaying an unmatched poverty in leadership in respect of any yardstick that might be chosen.
The year long strategic celebration of our 50th year of Independence and the concomitant thrust for our elevation to republican status are therefore patent ploys by the Government to distract the country from the above realization and lull us into acceptance of another term for them when every effort and resource should instead be concentrated on getting us out of the morass that has been largely created by them.
Republicanism might be a good thing for Barbados but not as it appears to have been framed at present. If our leaders can identify how Republicanism will improve the lot of the majority of our citizens and correct many of the ills identified in the past 50 years It should be pursued carefully and deliberately and certainly not within the next 2 years.
So 2015 was characterized by two main happenings which, imho [in my opinion], could be most influential re. governance in this country in the future.
The most important of these was the possibility of our taking on republican status without it being the resultant of the groundswell of the people’s wishes but rather a strategy for deifying a failed leader and for extending the rule of the current lot.
The next most important was the lessons enshrined in the Cahill affair which, to me, suggested that a Government that cared little for normal checks and balances was able to survive by a policy of non-engagement with its publics in this most important of projects. Such survival sends the wrong messages to Governments in waiting and must be nipped in the bud in such a way that future governments will be unwilling to take such a path again.
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