Caribbean News Service (CNS).
BRIDGETOWN, Barbados, May 10 2016 – The leader of the main opposition Barbados Labour Party, (BLP), Mia Mottley, Tuesday described the Freundel Stuart government as being “incompetent,” accusing it also of running the country by “stealth” and bringing the island to its knees economically and otherwise.
Mottley, piloting a motion of no confidence in the government, said that the circumstances in which Barbados has found itself cannot be borne for much longer.
“We cannot have a government by stealth, a government by rumour and a government by anonymity,” she told legislators noting that there had been a constant refrain that Barbados “was punching above its weight” with regards to its social and economic progress in years gone by, but that lately, the other islands of the Caribbean had surpassed Barbados.
“Given the government’s refusal to accept any good counsel from any and all quarters, including from within its own during the last eight years we know as do most Barbadians that the most pressing challenges facing this country extend beyond and deeper than the economic and fiscal quagmire in which we now find ourselves.”
She said Barbadians have had to watch in “total bewilderment where there has been no sense of purpose expressed by its government nr any direction shown by them.
“We should be further today, and we expected to be further today,” she said, making reference to the island’s 50th anniversary of political independence from Britain this year.
“We have to confront the truth,” she said, adding that it is not just not “our economy that is broken, it is the Barbados brand that is broken”.
Mottley told legislators that the government is “incompetent” and that there is an absence of hope and pride in Barbados today.
The opposition party leader reiterated early positions that over the last few months the country has been on auto-pilot “lurching from crisis to crisis”.
In the 2013 general election, the ruling DLP won 16 of the 30 seats in the parliament.