Dear Editor,
Unwittingly, both Abba and Hollywood had already immortalized the Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley in song and movie in the way of a spiritual prophecy, as in Rameses dictatorial expression in the Ten Commandments: “So shall it be said, so shall it be done.”
Mia becoming a voice from the wilderness to a universal prophetess seemed destined to happen when Abba put words in Mia’s mouth as they sang, “There’s a fire in my soul”. When at the UN world leaders from the US, England, France, Germany, China etc. rushed to their seats to hear what the Barbados PM had to say in her address to the General Assembly, you knew the world had found a new voice to eloquently articulate what troubled mankind. When she was finished speaking, you knew she had fire in her soul.
Of the millions of citizens who belong to this region, only a handful of persons have made it to the pages of Time Magazine let alone its front cover, so Mia making it there says simply, she has made it. It is not just the reception at the UN that clinched that iconic cover picture for her but the fact that she won the GE 15-nil in her country suggests that she has so unified her people that her detractors are minimal in the Barbados equation. Uniting one’s people to that extent definitely means that Ms. Mottley is doing and saying what is right.
In fact, Barbados has become the classic example of what a united nation is supposed to be. It is the duty of leaders to not be divisive but to be the symbol of unification. Mottley already has the aka Mama attached to her name immediately enjoins her to be the Mother of her nation – something to which she has taken to like the proverbial duck to water.
Most Trinis celebrate this elevation of their PM to the global stage and if we have sour cherry mouth as a result, it is only because we too hope we could produce leaders of such high end quality in our political arena; persons who are more than just the sum total of their IQ-challenged sycophants.
L. Siddhartha Orie