Leadership is vital in small countries

22.Jan.10

Editor: People vote for all sorts of reasons, some of these are purely emotional and some are rational. Usually there is a mix of both reasons. Often times people vote through party loyalties. They vote for individual candidates, policies, performance, the team or leadership. Leadership is vital, particularly in small countries like ours. In fact, leadership is a resource of great importance in countries where resources are limited.{{more}}

Whatever your political party allegiance, unbiased persons would conclude that our Prime Minister, Dr. Ralph Gonsalves, is an important leadership resource for SVG. The same could possibly be said of Sir James Mitchell, although he is over the hill, so to speak. But by no stretch of the imagination can anyone say that Arnhim Eustace is an important leadership resource.

Arnhim Eustace is lackluster in every leadership department, and everybody knows this. Even Eustace is aware of this fact, too. He is a follower in the second tier at best, and he can be described as a run of the mill technocrat with no special features or qualities. In my mind, no matter how you dress him up he would never be a leader.

So why is the NDP persisting in foisting him on the people of SVG? The answer is that they cannot do better, and there is no credible alternative. Messers Friday, Cummings, Lewis, and Leacock do not measure up at all in the leadership stakes.

Eustace led the NDP to defeat in 2001 when he was Prime Minister, and then lost in 2005 when he was leader of the Opposition. It is likely that he would lose again at the next elections, despite what the NDP thinks about the results of the referendum.

Usually when a leader of a mass party suffers one electoral defeat, then he offers his resignation. When he suffers two massive defeats in a row he simply goes, he resigns. But not Eustace, yet he has the gall to ask Prime Minister Gonsalves to resign because of a referendum vote. That is pure madness in my opinion, and no one except the narrow cocoon of the NDP takes that call seriously.

Joseph Blugh