Eyes on Power Guyana extends congratulations to Dr David Estwick on his election as President of the Democratic Labour Party.
It is no small thing to take up the leadership of a party at its lowest ebb and ask it to rebuild. We wish him well in the work of renewal, and we recognise the responsibility he now carries to the members who placed their confidence in him.
We hold no brief in Barbadian party politics. But whoever stands as opposition to Prime Minister Mottley inherits questions her government has never answered — and Barbadians are entitled to press them. There are three.
First — reparations abroad, silence at home. Prime Minister Mottley commands the world’s stage on reparations and African upliftment. Yet she has stood, comfortably and repeatedly, beside an administration in Georgetown that — in the words of its own African-Guyanese leaders — champions reparations internationally while doing nothing to repair the legacies of enslavement at home. Her advocacy abroad has never once been troubled by that contradiction standing beside her.
Second — the Saint Barnabas Accord. In 2022, Mottley and President Ali signed it with considerable fanfare: 1,000 Blackbelly sheep to Guyana, concessional land, and 50 acres of Guyanese soil to be owned by young Barbadians. Guyana’s government committed millions. Three years on, only a fraction of the sheep arrived, the rollout stalled by the government’s own account, and the leaders who cut the ribbon fell silent. Since then, the Leader of the Opposition has alleged — with drone imagery — that Blackbelly sheep sit on the President’s private estate, an allegation the Agriculture Minister has denied as false. Both cannot be true. Barbados sent breeding stock that multiplies quickly; four years on, where is the flock this program was meant to build, where are the 50 acres promised to young Barbadians, and what became of the public funds? A donor nation is owed an accounting.
Third — the appeals she has not answered. In February 2025, Guyanese businessman Terrence Campbell addressed an open letter directly to Prime Minister Mottley, copied to Caribbean heads and international missions, warning of democratic decline in Guyana. That same year, Vincent Alexander, Chairman of IDPADA-G, laid the systematic marginalisation of Afro-Guyanese before the United Nations. Has the champion of African upliftment abroad acknowledged the Africans of Guyana who appealed to her by name?
The podium and the record do not match. Someone should make her say why.
Eyes on Power Guyana
31 August 2026
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