There is something to be said for the sharp contrast between how the national response to the COVID-19 pandemic is being administered in our colleague CARICOM member country, Barbados and how it is being handled here. While there is no evidence that the health authorities are not doing their best in the circumstances, there is much more to managing this malady than testing and treatment. The situation requires focused leadership.
In the instance of Barbados, it appears that leadership is paying off as manifested in what the authorities have had to say recently about the change in the national attitude towards compliance with the protective strictures and what, as a consequence, has been the recent measured and incremental decisions which the authorities in the CARICOM member state have been able to make in the matter of the relaxation of the protocols guiding public behaviour as the pandemic persists.
What has been most noticeable about Barba-dos’ efforts to manage the national response to the coronavirus is the ‘up front’ role that has been assumed by the island’s Prime Minister, Mia Mottley and what now appears to be an encouraging national response to her authoritative posture. Here, one hastens to point out, first, that managing the public response to a pandemic on a 166 square mile island in the Caribbean Sea where the entire population is relatively easily reachable is likely to be a challenge of a lesser magnitude than doing so on a 83,000 square-mile continental space in South America where huge swathes of the country are cut off from its administrative heart, where we share land borders with two neighbours (including one that now boasts probably the second highest infection rate in the world) and where the ability of the powers that be to enforce the requisite strictures, the further you move from the capital, is at best, tenuous.
There has been, from the commencement of the effort here in the Caribbean to try to fend off the coronavirus, a measure of region-wide pushback; so that it would be unfair to single out Guyana as being unique in the matter of popular delinquency. There had been, from the time that it had been determined that social distancing and curfews were two of the requisites necessary to try to push back the virus, a certain aggressive resistance to those strictures here in Guyana. It was a question of large sections of the populace concluding that curfews, face masks and social distancing were measures that cut into the very heart of their highly valued social pursuits. So strong was the resistance to change that there even occurred here in Guyana a fairly strong and vociferous popular assertion that the coronavirus was no more than a killjoy, a contrivance concocted to curtail customary freedoms.
From the outset, too, it appeared that the authorities failed to recognize the magnitude of the problem, the primary weakness here appearing to be in the indifference of the authorities to back the prescribed restrictions with a measure of ‘force.’ On the one hand large numbers of people asserted what they quite mistakenly took to be their ‘democratic right to ignore the strictures; and then of course there was what seemed to be the patent inability of the forces of law and order to properly enforce the protocols. To put it bluntly, it even seemed to be, a kind of across-the-board palpable indifference to transgressions of the protocols to the point where as far as reining in the transgressions were concerned, the police may well have come to be seen in many instances as part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
But we in Guyana have had to face another problem which may well have seriously retarded the national effort to enforce the strictures. We arrived at a point where a sizeable section of public opinion appeared to hold the view that a morally questionable official allowance had been made for exemptions from the curfew-related strictures. Here they not only openly pointed fingers at what they saw as examples of those exemptions but felt, as well, empowered to persist in their own delinquency. Put bluntly, a strong case can be made for suggesting that the authorities might not have been leading by example and that those who had been witnessing what they perceived as a double standard were using the anomaly to justify their own delinquency. Whatever the truth here the available evidence suggests that night time curfew transgressions have reached a level of downright outrageousness.
Even given the differences between Guyana and Barbados that have already been pointed out including the far greater level of logistical challenge that Guyana faces in enforcing the COVID-19 restrictions, some things are worth pointing out. First, it is clear that Prime Minister Mottley has deemed the COVID-19 pandemic to be a national threat of a sufficient magnitude to place herself, personally, at the helm of the Barbados’ response. She has remained, enduringly, the public face behind the national effort to bring public behaviour in Barbados in line with the country’s best possible defences against the pandemic.
Notably, she has, it seems, not been afraid to set both her face and her authority against attempts at counterproductive pushback from pockets of delinquents. That, one feels, is much of the reason why she was able to announce last week that her government has seen a considerable change in the behaviour of Barbadians in relation to respecting the protocols designed to help guard against the spread of COVID-19. It is against this backdrop that she has been able to announce the recent phased reopening of the country and express a clear optimism in the matter of a further ease in the restrictions governing how Barbadians can operate going forward. “We are trending in the right direction,” was her upbeat, if measured assessment of how Barbados is faring in its fight against COVID-19.
What are we to make about the circumstances here? Given the nexus between what, for all we know, may be an increasing infection rate and the implications for the immediate-term well-being of the country, shouldn’t the President be seen to be at the helm of the pushback against the pandemic? Shouldn’t he be the one continually and vocally setting his face against the transgression of the night time curfew and insisting on a much more robust curfew enforcement regime? The fact of the matter is that where there exists no persuasive evidence of what can be described as marked success in improving the level of popular adherence to the curfew-related protocols even in the coastal communities and where there appears to be no robust and sustained official insistence, backed by the requisite deterrent, then, insofar as seeking to control the infection rate is concerned, we may well be on a hiding to nowhere.
That has to change. We have arrived at a point where it is the President that has to have the highest profile in the national response to what remains a national emergency.
