Weekly Column

It warmed our hearts on Tuesday to hear Minister Donville Inniss inform the House and the country that Barbados was embarking on the final phase of the Barbados Labour Party Government’s plan to secure the rights to our maritime space by applying to the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf to extend the outer limits of our continental shelf. We congratulate the Government for finally admitting to the wisdom of our initial application to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea for a ruling on our maritime borders with Trinidad & Tobago by completing this important corollary to the plans we set in motion while in office.

Minister Inniss asked Barbadians to be proud that Barbados is the first small developing nation to make such an application. We do not know where the Minister was in April 2006 when the Arbitral Tribunal announced its Award, but Barbadians were justifiably proud then of the prescience of our team led by then Attorney-General Mia Mottley and Sir Henry Forde in what has become a landmark ruling in Compulsory Jurisdiction and Equitable Maritime Boundary Delimitation and has secured the rights to our maritime resources for generations yet unborn.

The fact that Barbados sought to keep fisheries at the heart of the boundary dispute led the Tribunal to impose a duty on both Trinidad and Barbados to negotiate in good faith to conclude a new fisheries agreement. This was a far cry from February 2004 when Prime Minister Manning declared the issue of maritime boundaries as “intractable” and a stumbling block to the conclusion of a fishing agreement. We note that Minister Inniss now expects conclusion of the fishing agreement by July, following the report from the FAO requested last year on regional flying fish stocks.

Effective leadership calls for bold decisions and sometimes unconventional actions. The Barbados Labour Party has never been afraid of either. Owen Arthur demonstrated this when he successfully challenged our blacklisting by the WTO and Mia Mottley demonstrated it by her leadership in the Arbitral Proceedings. Left to David Thompson we would be fat and bloated on fish soup with nothing to show for it, but memories of the sea breeze at Glenburnie.

The DLP Opposition howled in unison about the $12 million dollar cost of appearing before the Tribunal. They made all sorts of outlandish claims from the Opposition benches – each one more myopic than the first. It is one of life’s ironies that in their first Estimates of Revenue for 2008 they expect to realize $70 million dollars in the first instance from the oil industry as a direct consequence of our decision to secure our maritime resources. This is a 500% return on our investment in the Arbitral process and a clear example of the benefits of courageous and visionary leadership with significant, long-term rewards for the country.

Now of course, desperation has trumped shame as the Government seeks to re-brand our initiatives in a frantic attempt to have something positive to report about their stewardship. Minister Michael Lashley did it last week with the IADB housing programme, negotiated before the elections by the BLP and Minister Inniss has jumped on the same self-serving bandwagon this week.

Sooner or later though the coat tails will start to shorten and disappear. If the recent examples of the Prime Minister’s inability to think through the simple mechanics of a policy before implementation is any yardstick of their future successes, then Peter Wickham’s warning about the dangers of becoming a one term government may yet become one of his most famous predictions.