PM Mottley commended for her leadership

Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley is being commended for her leadership and this country’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The kudos is coming Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Centre for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. He spoke to this yesterday during the Vice-Chancellor’s Forum and Distinguished Arthur Lewis Virtual Event titled, ‘A Conversation on Sustainable Island Futures’, where he shared the stage with Prime Minister Mottley.

“I’m very delighted and honoured to be with you Prime Minister, you were doing a magnificent job and in the midst of tremendous, unprecedented challenge of our time – COVID-19. You’ve had great success, we’ve experienced it ourselves the rigour of Barbadians in keeping this pandemic under control, from before we left, to the moment we arrived, through every other step – the care, the diligence, the attention, the testing, the hygiene is exactly right. And you have created an environment in which this gets done,” he stated.

His comments came as he noted that the mortality rate in Barbados from COVID is less than 1/10 of the United States, and he described that as a tremendous accomplishment.

Female leaders managed better

Sachs went on to say that the quality of leadership makes a big difference in the nature of the public’s reaction, and suggested that it is scientifically provable that women have been better leaders during this pandemic period than men. With that in mind, he said he is rooting for more female leaders.

“I will give you a biased sample – Trump, Bolsonaro, AMLO, Boris Johnson, there are no women in that list. You know what that list represents? Narendra Modi. That list represents the countries at the top of the world in deaths... Brazil 500 000 deaths; the United States 600 000 deaths; India officially about 300 000, but my Indian epidemiology colleagues tell me it’s maybe five or ten times more because of underreporting of deaths in the countryside,” he said.

The professor continued, “Then I compare with you, but I’ll add in Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand, who went for months in New Zealand with not one case, because they took it seriously, another two islands there in New Zealand. And it’s interesting, I often praise the Nordic countries, there are five of them – Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, and Finland. It happens that four of them have women leaders, women Prime Ministers. That’s first of all not an accident, because they’re well in governed countries, but if you rank them, the one with the man had death rates more than twice the next one, and almost ten times the others that was Sweden.”

He went on to say that what is needed more than anything in our countries and in the world is cooperation, rather than divisive politics. He maintained that the issues we face in the world cannot be solved by confrontation, as he warned that such an approach would only put us “deeper into the mess”.

(JRT)