WITH THE PRESENTATION of the national Budget now behind him, Prime Minister Freundel Stuart says resolving the deficit in the national economy remains among the top agenda items for his Government.
And he is in no hurry to call any general election.
Asked specifically to name a date for the pending by-election, due by January 21, to fill the St John seat made vacant by the death of David Thompson, his predecessor, Stuart said it was a matter to which he was still to give his full attention.
“I am looking at that, and I know that the decision [on a candidate] has to be carefully made.”
But quite apart from his immediate political and economic agenda, the Prime Minister is concerned about the general direction in which the country seems to be headed.
In an exclusive SUNDAY?SUN interview this week, Stuart, 59, pointed to falling national standards while using excellence as his benchmark for performance.
The Prime Minister is equally troubled by an attitude of “instant success” most pervasive among the youth in a “press button age”.
“The truth is that there is nothing called instant success,” he warned.
“Instant yam, yes; instant coffee, yes; but there is nothing called instant success,” he stressed.
From the heights of his Bay Street office, Stuart further cautioned that “genuine sucess is ultimately the result of sacrifice and hard work”.
“These are things that we have to get back to and instil in the nation. If Barbados is going to be a great nation, we cannot lose sight of these things,” he said.
In the same vein, the Prime Minister knocked what has been described elsewhere as “the education spiral”, which he defined as the preoccupation with the acquisition of qualifications and designations, “which when you probe behind them, the holders are not very good exemplars of them”.
During the wide-ranging interview, he also dismissed recent marital rumours, saying there is “vast mythology woven around poor Freundel Stuart”.
