By: Kimberly Ramkhalawan
May 24, 2022
Barbados Prime Minister, Mia Amor Mottley continues to win the hearts of many not just within the region, but across the world. This as Times Magazine has named her one of their ‘100 Influential people of 2022’, coming in among other global leaders such as Ukraine’s President Vladmir Zelensky, US President Joe Biden and recently appointed US Supreme Court judge, Ketanji Brown Jackson.
The listing comes after the Barbadian Prime Minister has been busy making waves on global platforms in recent months.
Her passionate message at the COP 26 meeting held in Glasgow, Scotland before a packed audience earned her much respect standing up for small island developing states, especially the Caribbean, in the face of mounting climate change and effects it has been having on vulnerable countries in the Caribbean.
It was at COP 26 World Leaders Summit in November 2021, she told those gathered that her intentions to champion a “global ambition to save our people and to save our planet”. Since those words, Mottley was dubbed the Caribbean rockstar, with ordinary citizens across the world calling for her to be the change in their own nations, and she has not stopped, calling for climate change to be renamed the ‘climate crisis’.
Her talk is also seen her walk, with its nation already near becoming 100 percent solar powered, something it embarked upon since the 1970s, and since 2019, has pursued its first grid-scale solar farm with a feed-in tarriff was introduced the same year making the nation resilient against power outages in the event of hurricanes.
Mottley’s front page of the Times is only one of a select few of Caribbean personalities to be featured on the reputable magazine. Jamaican reggae artist, Bob Marley was highlighted on its front page when his biopic Bob Marley the Making of a Legend was released. In 1999, Times listed Bob Marley & The Wailers’ “Exodus” as the greatest album of the 20th century, while in 2016, Jamaican athlete and multiple Olympic gold medalist, Usain Bolt was spotlighted as most influential in sports.
Cuban Revolutionist Fidel Castro has also been on the front page of the Times magazine several times for his controversial stands, while Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez was placed at front following his death in 2013.
Director General of the World Trade Organization, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala wrote the accolades for Mottley describing her as “Bold, fearless, and possessing a great intellect and wit, the Prime Minister is a brilliant politician who knows how to shake things up.”
In March this year, Mottley was invited by the World Trade Organization (WTO) to deliver its Presidential Lecture under the theme “Reinventing the Global Order,” at its Headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. There she spoke boldly calling or more to be done to protect data in the world of trade, and spoke out against the negative impact it has been having in smaller economies of scale while delivering the inaugural. She had argued that new big tech data firms were creating an oligopoly that was disadvantageous to small island states in the way they conduct trade and commerce, going further to describe it as “simply the embalming of the old colonial order that existed at the time of the establishment of these institutions”, all while questioning the price that was being paid in the name of multi-lateralism and internationalism.
In January she led her Barbados Labour Party into a landslide victory at the polls retaining her title as Prime Minister.
The WTO Director General in his write up makes mention of this, along with what he describes as her making “strides boldly on the world stage, is an embodiment of our conscience, reminding us all to treat our planet, and therefore one another, with love, dignity, and care”.
At age 56, she has served the BLP as its leader since 2008, becoming the eighth person to hold the office of Prime Minister in Barbados and its first woman to hold that position. Her entrance into Barbados politics dates back to 1991, having served as its Minister of Education in 1994 under the stewardship of then PM Owen Arthur. Her educational background entails having a law degree received in 1985 from the University of London.