Last Updated on November 10, 2025 10:19 am by Editor
GUEST EDITORIAL
The New National Party led by Kemar Stuart is breaking the mould that most Barbados third parties appear to have fashioned for themselves.
Consistently, so-called third parties in Barbados have lived up to the dire prophecies of political analysts and pundits such as Dr. George Bell and Peter Wickham. Those gentlemen have unswervingly predicted the defeat of third parties at the polls and their relegation to a state of rigor mortis after the election.
So far, these political pundits have been right. But whose fault is it? Our thesis here is that third parties have only themselves to blame. Let’s examine this.
Looking Back
In 2018 election, one got the sense that the country was ready for a change from the BDLP, the pejorative term Barbadians use to indicate that they see no difference between the two so-called established parties.
The 2018 results show that Solutions Barbados did better than any other third party up to that point and since then. In fact, had there been a Proportional Representation System in place the party would have gained at least one seat as the Exhibit shows.
The matter of Proportional Representation should be a burning issue at this time given the undesirable – and frankly biased- recommendation of the Barbados Constitutional Reform Commission to keep the FPTP system that brought us two successive 30-0 election outcomes.
But the fact that it is not a burning issue tells us a lot about our collective level of political awareness and political immaturity. However, I digress.
So, what went wrong for Solutions Barbados in 2018? In essence, the leadership of the party inadvertently sabotaged it. By making a pre-emptive decision that would have potentially cost a successful candidate one-quarter million dollars, the fledgling party lost momentum as well as candidates.
The final anti-climax, in our view, came when the party announced, at its grand launch in Independence Square, that it was going to abolish Corporation Tax or reduce it to some insignificant amount. I do not quite remember which.
In any event, it was a promise that common sense and a little knowledge of the workings of government would tell you was not feasible in the short run or perhaps even the medium term, barring a miracle.
Free Press
The NNP under Stuart is currently getting the kind of free press from which some of the third parties claim they have been debarred for years.
Now anyone who has done any substantial course in Marketing and Public Relations, knows that media houses do not offer free press unless it is newsworthy. That is standard practice in the world of mass media.
So if, a “third party” sits down on its rear end all year and has nothing substantial to say about the multitude of ills and issues Barbados is facing, how is it going to get free press? It is a no-brainer!
Even if one has not done a course in Marketing, a little commonsense should suggest that one cannot wait until an election is called to present a party to the electorate. That is what the NNP implicitly understands.
Victimization
I am aware that there is a real fear of “political victimization” in Barbados, a matter that needs to be seriously addressed. But we cannot be boasting about our democracy in front of the world and then have a situation in the country where people are afraid to openly offer themselves as candidates in an election. That has to stop.
What third parties need to do is stop thinking inside of the box and start pooling together local and/or foreign legal resources to sue any entity that victimizes potential candidates. The only way we are going to stop some of the BS dished out in this society is by meeting it frontally and forcefully.
In the meantime, parties can use the “lightning rod” technique where one “independent” individual in the party acts as the spokesperson for the party up to an appropriate point. To its credit, this is the approach Solutions Barbados used successfully in the run up to the 2018 election. Every challenge has a solution, no pun intended!
But let’s come back to the main point.
TMA
What the NNP is doing quite well at this point is building its TMA. TMA stands for Top-of-Mind Awareness, a metric used in the field of marketing communications. But what is it?
TMA is the FIRST product or brand that comes to mind when you ask about a certain category of product in the market. For example, the first brand or product that comes to mind when you hear (a) fast food or (b) bath soap or (c) commercial bank, would be the brand that has greatest TMA in each category.
On its current trajectory the NNP should become top-of-mind when anyone asks about third parties in Barbados in the months ahead.
Now, it is not our intention here to detail the marketing strategies that can be used to create TMA. The basic and obvious point that we wish to make here is that hitherto, third parties have demonstrated a complete lack of understanding of the relevance of professional Marketing – or at the very least, Marketing Communications – to electoral politics. But why is that so?
Mindsets
In our view, that condition exists because third parties are of the mindset that an election is a special season of activity rather than a special application of Marketing. It is a defeatist attitude confirmed by successive election failures.
The mention of mindsets brings us to another attitude that needs to be emphasized. That is the mindset of the electorate.
The often unstated, but nonetheless real, de facto position of the Barbadian electorate is that if a third party cannot organize itself into a serious professional entity long before an election is called – and one must stress “long before an election is called” – why should the electorate give that party an opportunity to form the government or be a major part of it?
The electorate’s position is a common-sense position. What it is saying is that if you cannot manage yourself why should we give you an opportunity to govern which is simply a higher level of management?
Put yet another way, the electorate is saying that we know what we have – meaning the established parties – but you are an unknown and you are not giving us a long enough time to form a clear opinion of you. You see the point?
What the NNP is doing, even if instinctively, is taking time to build TMA. If it continues on this path, it is likely to do well in the coming election because Barbadians are still looking for a meaningful alternative.
Conclusion
What should encourage the NNP is this: even if it does not win the next election outright – that is gain 16 seats- but can gain say, half a dozen seats, it will mark the end of the two-party musical chairs that has dominated this country’s political landscape for too many years.
We wish the NNP well.
Article by Dr Aldon D. Tull Retired Educator
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