Now, for those of you who read that phrase and wonder if your humble correspondent may have started taking inspirational business courses which usually end up telling you how to flip real estate while you are doing yoga on a mat in your multimillion-dollar mansion, fear not. I wouldn’t even be able to afford the course.
Ms Mottley got the chance – apparently the first time in three years – to sharpen her chops with the business community when she addressed the Barbados Chamber of Commerce & Industry’s final monthly luncheon for the year at Hilton Barbados last week.
Given the current state of what passes for leadership in our government these days, it may seem that Ms Mottley might not have to extend herself that much. Five years of an administration living way, way beyond its means in order to keep its voting base employed in government jobs, while three times publishing strategy documents which were then scrupulously ignored or undermined by itself, has set the bar very low.
But it isn’t just knowing what needs to be done, as the present government knows that very well, having told us in no uncertain terms in its last and equally ignored document, the Medium-Term Growth and Development Strategy, but having the courage to implement it.
And it isn’t about outlining a good mix of attractive incentives for various sectors without giving way the store as we have done with Gordon “Butch” Stewart. It’s more about getting people to believe that you and your administration are really going to follow through on your promises and vision for the future.
In short, Mia Mottley’s main challenge last week was to convince the standing-room-only audience that showed up to see and hear her that she would not only be a better leader than Prime minister Freundel Stuart, but that she would measure up to her predecessor in the party, former prime Minister Owen Arthur.
For although he was not there in body, he surely was in spirit, and without a doubt he was the invisible elephant in the room.
Ms Mottley showed she was capable of taking on the mantle of economic leadership by her informed summary of the predicament in which we find ourselves and which grows worse every day, and by her pragmatic call for a return to sanity in our economic affairs, surprisingly calling for a constitutional amendment (it sounded like) to balance the Government’s budget every year.
However, where Mr Arthur is able to construct clear policy measures out of economic ideas, Ms Mottley likes to focus instead on rallying the better angels of our nature to rise up and save Barbados from its economic decline.
This type of exhortation is more suited to parliament, where you know the ultimate listener is the average voter, whose pocketbook issues are not the same as those of the captains of industry.
The Opposition Leader will need to offer sharper policies in the future if she wants to achieve the goal of winning the confidence of the business community and to take over the title of Undisputed Champion of Economic Policy from Mr Arthur.
However, she won’t have to try to wrest from Mr Stuart the title of Undisputed Champion of Avoiding Economic Issues, as there will never be another who could ever successfully challenge the incumbent prime minister in this category.
I don’t believe Ms Mottley will be able to motivate the private sector as much as she needs to unless and until the hand of Mr Arthur is more visible in her economic prescriptions. It cannot escape attention that the former prime minister is still making major economic policy speeches as presumably a mere backbencher. The point being . . . ? I will leave it there as I know nothing of politics. But you know me: I do not patronize.
Ms. Mottley came across last week as a master of the details of our finances without offering too many prescriptions of her own, saying that either the opposition is not given the timely information it needs to make such contributions, or that whenever they do, they are pilloried by the government, which then ignores them anyway.
The asset that may have, however, accrued to Ms Mottley’s greatest benefit on the old balance sheet with the business people who came to see her was that she was able to show she is comfortable in her renewed role as Leader of the Opposition.
Her conversational, “speak from the heart”, folksy style went well with her proclamation of the need to talk with the business community on how to move the country forward, and to exhort them to continue to hang in there, basically, until the government finally changes.
