The virus of which I speak is the practice of pelting everything, including the proverbial kitchen sink, at the electorate in a heady and intoxicating mix of glittering promises and downright lies, on the basis that power at any price is the new and glorifying principle of politics. It is a two-edged sword, on which the pelters are "boomeranged" from time to time
once the rat escapes from the bag! Remember 1991?

When the rat has escaped, a
"one-term" government becomes clearer, as the voters cry out en masse or almost en masse when – as in the Pauline experience – their Damascus moment removes the scales from their eyes, and in the lyrics of Johnny Nash, they "can see clearly now, the rain has gone".

Yet at that moment, the biblical injunction to "gather the fragments and let nothing be lost" will avail them not, for in the absence of the miraculous appearance of five barley loaves and two fishes and a Messiah, the unfortunate multitude will simply have to suck salt or plant a kitchen garden.

Recent price increases resulted from international events even before election day earlier this year. It was not therefore beneficial to the public interest for the Democratic Labour Party (DLP) to tell voters that the cause of high supermarket prices was due to an unholy alliance between corporate Bridgetown and the Barbados Labour Party (BLP).

It was simply not true, but the canard that it was, it went down like a hot ball of mellow cou cou and salt fish, garnished with hot pepper sauce and pickled cucumber. The viral accusation hit a nerve and it paid off for the DLP who served up this barbed wire fare. Yet, what "sweetens a goat's mouth
will burn his tail" and "a people get
the government they deserve".

It is also politically correct that those who do not remember past mistakes will repeat them. And it seems they did!

In the election campaign of January 1991, the DLP's platform maintained that the economy was batting like [the Rt Excellent] Sir Garfield Sobers. The DLP also won that election on January 22, and by the end of that month, all three stumps of the economy were shown to have been cat-spraddled and we were firmly in the hands of the International Monetary Fund.

The 2008 election therefore may be history repeated and two generations
of voters may now compare notes!

The success of the DLP strategy will not be lost on anyone, and if the BLP and the People's Empowerment Party adopt the "wild promises" approach to politics, then, sooner or later, the social contract inherent in the manifestos
will mean nothing.

Already the seeds of cynicism are growing, and on some very fertile ground at that. The House of Assembly was recently told that some general manifesto promises of the BLP were not kept for over 9 000 days. The same is also true of the DLP, and is inherent in the nature of politics. One simply cannot do everything stated in the manifestos.

But it is something of a different nature when 100-day promises are
made and then not kept. Such promises are like entrenched clauses in a constitution. They are special and
are taken as such by all sides and
that is why they are elevated for
special deadline treatment of the
100-day period.

The integrity of the two-party system in Barbados is a tribute to the hard work of the DLP, but the repeated flashing of special promises and big
lie gimmicks before the electorate will surely destroy the same democracy, when those promises are not kept.

Even in politics, some things are like sacred cows, and 100-day promises cannot therefore be sacrificed on the altar of political expediency.

*Ezra Alleyne is an attorney-at-law and former Deputy Speaker
of the House of Assembly.