Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley Addresses Nation and Announces Cabinet Changes in 2024

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By Ralph Jemmott

In a reportedly 65-minute address, Prime Minister Mia Mottley spoke to the nation on a wide array of issues facing Barbados as it enters the year 2024.

She also took the opportunity to make some changes to her Cabinet which she would later claim as ‘adding value’ to the country and the administration. Not sure what that means, but as a Canadian friend likes to say, ‘a change is as good as a rest.’

It is good to see Marsha Caddle back in the Cabinet. She has a strong critical intellect and if there is any value to be added she should provide such. Much seems to be expected of Ambassador Chad Blackman who I do not know, but already there is talk of a future leadership role. As always the Prime Minister was optimistic, articulate and not a little bit self-congratulatory. Barbados, she reiterates, remains on track for a great ‘transformation’ sometime around 2030 or thereabouts.

Barbados as of January 1, 2024, is by no means a failed or failing state. It has a myriad of challenges, some of which are deeply rooted in the culture and are not easy to solve. Some of these problems are political, many are financial and economic and the most deep-rooted and often disregarded are social and psycho-social.

The political problem surrounds our capacity to remain a viable two-party democracy with a viable opposition that is able to responsibly critique government policy, offer realistic alternatives and if required, form an alternative government.

John Stuart Mill observed: “A Polity needs the constant agonistic dialectic of opposing perspectives so that the views of one side would keep the excesses of the other in check, otherwise irrationality results.” The two 30-to-0 defeats of the DLP were highly regrettable. It has led to a decline in the official opposition and the ostensible emergence of an autocratic tendency whereby power seems to reside inordinate in a single personage. This is nought for our comfort.

Barbados needs an effective opposition but it is difficult to see any significant revival of the DLP in the immediate future. The risk is a consuming sense of political apathy which would be in nobody’s interest except for those who in their own self-interest chose to align themselves with the ruling clique.

One of the persistently bemusing aspects of local politics is the tendency for governments in power to write off opposition criticism as ‘noise’ and the critics as purveyors of ‘gloom and doom’. There are always things that require in-depth examination no matter what party is in office.

Perhaps the most all-embracing challenge to the Barbadian polity remains the economy. No amount of wishful thinking by the present government or lamentation of gloom by opposition spokespersons can obscure the fact that the economy remains and is likely to remain structurally challenged. It may well remain under IMF sanction given its inability to earn the level of foreign exchange needed to sustain the rising expectations that we have come to cherish. One is not sure what it would take to fundamentally ‘transform’ or to use the current buzzwords effectively ‘build out’ the local economy.