Caribbean Round-Up
BRIDGETOWN, Barbados — With talk of an early election in the air, and amid preparations for the annual conference in a week’s time of the main opposition Democratic Labour Party (DLP), a call has come from one of its leading stalwarts for an alliance with the minority National Democratic Party (NDP).
Making the call is a long-serving cabinet minister and parliamentarian, Brandford Taitt, now a lead contestant for the post of president of the DLP. He is challenging the incumbent, Senator Clyde Mascoll, an economist.
Taitt, who served as health, trade and foreign minister at different periods, was quoted in yesterday’s Advocate as saying that “the reservoir of ideas that have been available to the NDP ought to be available to the DLP in a strategic alliance we (the DLP) might consider”.
Both Taitt and Mascoll were among the casualties when the governing Barbados Labour Party of Prime Minister Owen Arthur secured a second-term landslide at the January 1999 general elections. In those elections, the BLP humiliated the DLP with a 26-2 victory.
The DLP which, under its founder-leader the late Errol Barrow, took Barbados into independence from Britain in November 1966, however, secured just over a third of the popular vote.
It was then led by the young lawyer David Thompson, who quit as president last September in the wake of the BLP’s triumph in retaining the St Philip’s constituency at a by-election following the resignation of ex-Attorney-General David Simmons, who subsequently became Barbados’ new chief justice.
Though it stayed out of the last election and is viewed as being more on the periphery of party politics, the NDP, led by the DLP’s former finance minister, Dr Richie Haynes, remains quite vocal in its analyses on social, economic and political developments.
More recently, in its weekly column in the Nation newspaper it has been advocating a mix of the first-past-the-post electoral system with that of proportional representation.
Political observers here feel that a DLP-NDP alliance could “break new grounds” in strengthening the opposition to Arthur’s BLP.
Currently both the DLP and BLP are experiencing problems in their choice of potential election candidates and have been revealing significant levels of internal difficulties with some of the constituencies.
New Caricom HQ ‘great tonic’,
says Carrington
GEORGETOWN, Guyana — Secretary-general of the Caribbean Community (Caricom), Edwin Carrington, said that the new headquarters complex being built as a gift from Guyana to Caricom “is a great tonic for the Caribbean integration process and a boost for the moral of the community’s staff”.
Carrington, now in his third consecutive five-year term, was sharing his views with the media after accompanying President Bharrat Jagdeo to inspect the foundation work being laid for the secretariat complex that’s being constructed at a cost of US$8 million.
The project, which will include a conference centre, is expected to be completed in 2004 with some financial assistance the Guyana Government is receiving from Japan.
President Jagdeo, Caricom’s current chairman, who was in Jamaica last week as a guest of Prime Minister P J Patterson for Emancipation Day celebrations, was accompanied to the construction site four miles east of Georgetown by Carrington, Foreign Minister Rudy Insanally, Chancellor of the University of Guyana, Professor Calestous Juma and other officials.
During the visit, the president and the Caricom Secretariat team inspected ongoing works, the architectural and construction plans.