Do not mistake my silence as an incapacity to speak.
– Prime Minister Freundel Stuart
ON LISTENING TO THE response by the Prime Minister to public concerns over a forensic audit report into operations of CLICO, it was clear that he seemed less concerned about assuring victims of the CLICO collapse than he was about attacking the Government’s perceived critics.
Instead of offering a comforting word to the thousands of persons, including old age pensioners, who stand to lose thousands of dollars in life investments, he instead focused on the judicial managers who he informed had been paid “dizzying millions”.
In typical Caribbean authoritarian style, he boasted of having a list of all those who invested in CLICO’s Executive Flexible Premium Annuities, which according to his legal advice “was not a traditional insurance product”.
While denying the public’s lack of confidence in the Government’s self-appointed oversight committee as a reflection of Government itself, he conveniently sought to demonize investors whose trust in the existing regulatory institutions had indeed informed their investment decisions in the first place.
When taken in the context of a recent CADRES poll, which showed his leadership ratings slipping to new lows, and his party’s popularity ratings as slipping by 11 per cent since the last general election, Prime Minister Stuart’s recent comments offer a moment for deeper analysis.
Stuart’s main challenge is his inability to convey genuine human empathy and identification with his public. He uses language to score points rather than to convey feeling. Hence his favourite weapon is silence since it is the most effective tool for simultaneously achieving these twin goals. He is a lawyer always and a human less frequently.
A classic example of Stuart’s lawyering was seen where the Member for St George North accused the Government of avoiding a debate on the Estimates, by allowing the Opposition to speak without responses.
Stuart denied the claim and noted that the appropriate time for an economic policy debate was when the Government presented its Financial and Economic Policy resolution to Parliament, in keeping with former Prime Minister Owen Arthur’s practice of separating the Estimates debate from the Economic Policy debate.
What might have been forgotten was that on the last occasion in December 2014, no debate was held, since the Minister of Finance presented a Ministerial Statement, rather than a resolution to Parliament. Silence wins again.
In a context of a failing economic environment, there is a lot to suggest that the Prime Minister is merely enjoying “power for its one sake”. Unless there is a miraculous shift in the economic fortunes of Barbados which can provide the Prime Minister with real material responses to the challenges which his country faces, then Barbados can expect the Prime Minister’s style to continue to oscillate between “silent speech” and cold sophistry.
• Tennyson Joseph is a political scientist at the University of the West Indies Cave Hill Campus, specialising in regional affairs. Email tjoe2008@live.com.
