Caribbean eyes are on Barbados today, fixed and focused on the island’s first electoral contest ahead of the republic’s next big General Elections.
Observers’ eyes are wide-open on the bye-election for St. James North, contested by four candidates — one each representing the two major parties, plus two independents.
Constitutionally due in 2027 but expected before, the next Barbados poll will see Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley’s ruling Barbados Labour Party (BLP) roll the elections dice a third time against the opposition Democratic Labour Party (DLP).
Having won all 30-seats in the last two polls, the BLP will enter the next with its current decisive numerical advantage.
But if the DLP wins today, that can send shivers up BLP spines and boost the opposition’s high hopes to also avoid a deadly third consecutive clean-sweep at the polls.
Today’s election also features a Saint Lucia-born Barbados citizen representing the major Opposition party, resulting in Saint Lucians at home and abroad also keeping eyes and ears focused on the DLP’s Felicia Dujon.
Dujon, a popular fellow national, unsuccessfully contested in a previous Saint Lucia General Elections as a candidate for Castries Central (against Stanley Felix and Richard Frederick).
A lecturer at the Cave Hill Campus of the University of the West Indies (The UWI), she is today contesting the Barbados seat as a naturalized citizen – and as a Caribbean Community (CARICOM) national.
The activist DLP candidate has scored some unprecedented feats, including as a CARICOM national who’s contested elections in two Caribbean nations.
But she’s also not the first Saint Lucian woman to contest a Barbados election.
Mara Giraudy-Thompson, the Saint Lucia-born wife of late former DLP Prime Minister David Thompson, also won her husband’s seat after his sudden death from cancer in October 2010.
Dujon, as a Barbados citizen and voter, qualified to be registered as an election candidate.
But she is also among many other CRICOM nationals who also qualify to vote in Barbados, thanks to a historic 2018 ruling by the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ).
Saint Lucian nationals indeed played significant roles in pressing for and winning the right of qualified CARICOM nationals to vote in Barbados – and any member-state.
A summary of the CCJ’s 2018 ruling states: ‘In the 2018 case of Eddy David Ventose v. The Chief Electoral Officer of Barbados, the CCJ affirmed the right of Professor Ventose to be registered as an elector and to vote in Barbados.
‘The CCJ ruled that once an individual meets the statutory criteria for registration, the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) is obligated to register them.
‘The court found that the CEO could not add additional criteria beyond the statutory requirements to deny registration.’
It added: ‘The court held that upon meeting the conditions for registration, Professor Ventose had a right to be entered on the electoral register.’
But other CARICOM nationals who also tried to register claimed they ran into problems with registration officials and successfully filed a civil suit in the local courts citing as a precedent the CCJ’s ruling in favour of the Saint Lucia-born professor.
In that case (reported in Barbados Today on May 19, 2018) 14 claimants filed on behalf of some 122 CARICOM nationals who similarly qualified – and were eventually registered.
Exactly seven years later, Dujon’s candidacy again shone light on an important aspect of Caribbean democracy that’s often overlooked and under-appreciated.
High doses of Caribbean nationalism do exist (mainly under cover) in every CARICOM member-state, the quantum differentiating per country.
Nonetheless, it always rises above the surface on matters like non-nationals voting in national elections.
This matters to many in a region where, under Britain’s Westminster elections system, candidates can win (or lose) a seat by one vote.
It also matters to many in nations concerned, that non-Caribbean purchasers of passports through Citizenship by Investment (CIP) programs will also have bought the right to vote.
CARICOM’s leaders have, over time, quietly ensured that regional citizens do have a right to participate in elections in a nation not their place-of-birth, once they had lived, worked, owned property, married, or otherwise qualified according to requirements.
This writer lived, worked and got married in Guyana, where his wife gave birth to their fourth child — and he also qualified to vote during his years in the Cooperative Republic (1993 to 1999).
Many other qualified CARICOM nationals do likewise exercise their regional franchise and the Barbados precedent in 2018 set by the CCJ’s ruling will stand in any regional court.
It’s noteworthy too, that non-nationals also serve in the Barbados parliament – elected and unelected – as with Saint Lucia-born Barbados citizens Mara Thompson (in 2010) and Senator Johnathan Reid (BLP), the latter the highly-populated small island developing state’s current Minister of Innovation, Industry, Science & Technology.
Barbados is, therefore, a blooming microcosm of an actual (not viral or virtual) reality of Caribbean life that’s also been overlooked and underplayed: that many CARICOM Prime Ministers and Presidents were not born in the countries they lead or led.
For example: St. Kitts and Nevis’ Paul Southwell was born in Dominica, Dominica’s Roosevelt Skerrit was born in Guadeloupe, Grenada’s Maurice Bishop was born in Aruba, Guyana’s President Janet Jagan was born in the USA (Chicago), Saint Lucia’s Sir John Compton was born in St. Vincent and The Grenadines and Saint Lucia’s Allen Chastanet was born in Martinique.
The participation of Saint Lucians and other CARICOM nationals in Barbados’ electoral politics and its gubernatorial structure, therefore, is a timely reflection of the flowering maturity of this aspect of Caribbean democracy.
It’s also an indication that, never mind the carbuncles still impeding regionalism after six decades of independence and republicanism, Caribbean leaders and institutions do take decisions that enhance the region’s global image on this side of the global south.
It may be seen by some as ‘No big thing’, but this form of participatory democracy is surely a positive plug for regional integration.