Local talk show host and former government consultant Claude Skelton Cline is calling for locals to reset the standards used for electing leaders in the territory, especially politicians.
Cline’s comment came during a recent airing of his “Honestly Speaking” radio programme on Tuesday.
He said, “We’re going to have to reset the standard for who we elect as leaders, political leaders in particular but it really holds through for all leadership. There should be a base, there should be a floor, there should be a standard, there should be a plumbline, there should be a measuring stick for how we elect leaders in this country.”
“We can no longer afford to water down leadership in this country. The challenges that we face, the challenges that we will continue to face are geo-politically, socially, economically, you name it… we must set a standard for how we go about electing persons in this country,” he added.
Cline said while all persons should be allowed to seek leadership roles in a democracy, he believes there should exist an unwritten rule in the BVI’s culture that pinpoints only certain types of individuals for leadership roles.
He said the time has come when popularity should not be a determining factor in elected individuals to leadership roles.
“In a democracy anybody, no matter colour, faith, sexual orientation, anybody should be allowed to seek elected office…But there should be an unwritten rule embedded within our culture of an oral tradition type that says though anybody can run, anybody cannot be elected,” he stated.
“We can no longer afford to allow persons purely based on popularity. This is not pageantry, this is politics. The art of compromise, the art of going back and forth and negotiating and navigating the affairs of the people of a country. It cannot be based on your popularity in some other spare of life that may or may not be germane to you having the capacity, the ability to sit at tables of decisions and make enduring, make generational decisions about the lives of people,” Cline further stressed.