September 28, 2021
Prime Minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley, went up to the United Nations General Assembly and gave them an earful on what the large nations and that very same body had not been doing on colourism, race and global inequality. The same issues that has been plaguing developing nations since the global elites coined the term developing nation.
Everything is getting worse. Look around you, you would say the same thing too. I often blamed a former leader in my country for the downslide in my country, but it is bigger than him I feel. The corporate greed is killing this world, and they are in turn killing themselves.
The same American and European corporations that ran to China to take advantage of cheap labour are now crying that China has stolen all of their patents, but yet refuse to leave the Asian market at the same time. Talk about insanity.
But, alas, in 2021, I don’t think we needed Mia Mottley to say the same thing Muamar Ghaddaffi or Hugo Chavez have been saying for decades before their passing. Same thing with Fidel Castro and countless other African and Latin-American and Caribbean leaders, all saying the same thing- Be more fair to the rest of the world.
Alas, most likely Mottley’s calls fell on deaf ears because a venue for snooty, powerless diplomats is not a place where that message needed to be heard. The United Nations General Assembly is powerless, by design. The diplomats posted there are at best career civil servants who are on their retirement leg of their careers. So they can’t help and won’t help and even if they know how to help. If you lit fire to the building and told all of them that in order to get out they have to help with the crisis, every last one of you would die.
The message Prime Minister Mottley carried to the UNGA on our behalf needed to be heard in corporate America and Europe. It needed to be heard first and action taken to cut into their bottom line. Hit them where it hurts. That’s where it gets tricky.
Why we say tricky is because more than half of us out here don’t have the will and endurance to wait out the pain of repercussions from decisive action. We like 10 year old air-conditioner to keep us cool as well as that once a year trip to Miami Florida as our perks for being better than the other brownskin man or woman we share our respective countries with.
So, nice job Ms Mottley, but it needs more. So much more.