By Kimberly Ramkhalawan
Her voice is being touted as the Prime Minister of the Caribbean and even the world, following her address to the 76th Session of the United Nations General Meeting. Mia Amor Mottley, Prime Minister of Barbados did not mince words nor time in calling out the United Nations for its failure to ensure a worldwide vaccination plan is provided to stop this dreaded pandemic.
In her 15-minute address to the Assembly, the Barbadian Prime Minister stated her intentions not to talk or repeat what had been said times over, or even from her maiden speech delivered three years ago. Instead with glimpses to her phone screen, she took jabs in the form of rhetorical questions at leaders gathered and to those she described as the ‘faceless few’ that run the global economies of scale.
Since then, her address has captivated media outlets around the world for being one of the three female leaders to address the assembly this year, and one of thirteen women to speak over the course of the session.
She said while time has gone by, the world remains the same, with the needle having hardly moved from what it looked like a century ago, with hardly any action taken by leaders on behalf of the people of the world.
Her questions posed to the scanty auditorium went on record for calling out this said issue of how many more leaders must come to the podium and not be heard before they stop coming. She went on to point out the issue of fake news which has affected states and its rights to defend its digital spaces to how tech companies have a market capitalization of $9.3 tr dollars yet countries struggle to provide access to data and knowledge to their children as part of online education.
Mottley added that “the answer is we have the means to give every child on this planet a tablet and we have the means to give every adult a vaccine and we have the means to invest in protecting the most vulnerable on our planet, from a change in climate, but we chose not to. It is not that we do not have enough, it is because we do not have the will to distribute that which we have. And it is also because regrettably the faceless few do not fear consequences sufficiently.”
Once again the Barbadian prime minister made a plea on behalf of the Small Island Developing States (SIDS) for something to be done on the effects greenhouse gases continue to have on the rise in sea level and global temperatures. She said these firms needed to recognise that even a hundred billion dollars in adaptation was simply not even enough.
Her message also touched on colourism and sexism at the global annual forum, while she likened the present times to being on ‘the eve of the great depression and a time when a similar pandemic was being battled which lead to a time when fascism and popularism and nationalism led to the decimation of populations’.
Quoting Jamaican reggae singer Robert Nesta Marley, aka Bob Marley, Mottley questioned those gathered ‘who will get up and stand up for the rights of the people, who will stand up in the name of all those who died in this awful pandemic, or standup for those who died because of the climate crisis or who will stand up for the Small Island Developing States who need 1.5 degrees to survive as we go to COP 26. Who? Who? Will stand up? Not with a little token but with real progress’.
To this she added that these were issues that could be easily solved if we held the will to do so, Mottley said in what has since become her most viral response yet, ‘If we can find the will to send people to the moon, and solve male baldness as I have said over and over, we can solve simple problems like letting our people eat at affordable prices and making sure that we have the transport’.
She added that while democracy was what mattered at forums like these, it was time a reckoning of the majority and numbers be also counted for those who stood up there for the issues at hand. She noted that it was much more than the 50 nations that stood in 1945 during the UN’s first meeting but many nations ‘who must face their people and answer the needs of their people who want to know what is relevance of an international community that only comes and does not listen to eachother. That only talks and will not talk with eachother. Our voices must be heard and our voices must matter’.