Barbados Borrows Another US$35 Million From The World Bank – With No Accountability, Anti-Corruption Rules Or Oversight

Lucky You!

The Government of Barbados has just borrowed another US$35 Million from the World Bank – this time for HIV/Aids prevention & control for the next five years.

And that is just fine if the money gets spent as it is supposed to be spent.

The problem with Barbados is that we have no anti-corruption rules or legislation to govern how the money will be spent, and no transparency and freedom of information laws to allow citizens to effectively monitor how their government spends the citizens’ money.

Prime Minister David Thompson refuses to announce as policy that the government will not award contracts to businesses owned by government officials or their immediate family.

How much of the taxpayers’ US$35 million will be used as intended?

Perhaps a better question would be… Without freedom of information laws, how could a citizen know one way or the other how the money is being spent or misspent?

Further Reading

Press Release: Barbados Government Borrows US$35 Million From World Bank

Nation News Steals Quote and Story Ideas From Barbados Free Press – Fails To Credit Source

Here at Barbados Free Press we always credit the source for any materials that we comment upon.

Not once have we quoted from the Nation News and failed to name the source.

But it appears the cowardly editors at the Nation News do not feel it necessary to extend the same courtesy to Barbados Free Press. Many times we have written articles only to have them publish similar articles days or even weeks later – but this time they have directly quoted from Barbados Free Press without attribution.

Those lazy, unethical pretend journalists.

Of course, this is the same so-called “newspaper” that refused for two weeks to publish the news that the contractor of the Barbados flyover project had publicly admitted to bribing politicians in many other Caribbean countries when building bridge projects! For two weeks the Nation News was shamed by Barbados Underground and Barbados Free Press as we taunted the editors at The Nation to cover the story. (See BFP’s article Triumph Of The Blogs’ Print Editions – Nation News Shamed Into Reporting Fraud Allegations Against Barbados Flyover Contractor)

This is the same newspaper that allowed its own reporters to be roughed up by police on two separate occasions while they covered serious motor vehicle accidents. This is the same newspaper that kissed the feet of the Police Superintendent who forced their own reporter to erase photos of the bus accident. (Read the unbelievable-but-true story here)

What did the Nation News do about this outrage against a freedom of the press? Nothing… they let the story fade into nothing…. just like they were told.

Bottom Line: you can’t rely upon the Nation News to provide Bajans with the simple, honest truth about anything… and this latest story is but one more example.

Bryan Walker wrote in the Nation article When Size Matters…

Protests on blogs

Also on the blogs, Barbadians have been voicing concern about the matter.

One woman wrote: “This is ridiculous! Are we going to allow this American biologist, Blair Hedges, to walk in here and claim he has ‘discovered’ the smallest snake in the world, when this snake has been slithering around in the undergrowth since my childhood days? . . . How dare this man come in here and name a snake after his wife?”

That was a direct quote from Margaret Knight writing on Barbados Free Press which you can see right here.

Not only that, Nation News writer Bryan Walker lifted a main theme of our article that Barbados is receiving excellent worldwide coverage due to the popularity of this snake story.

Too bad that the so-called journalists at The Nation News don’t have the courage to report on the Ronja Juman story, or camp out in front of Gline Clarke’s home and ask him how it is that a Minister of Government built a home on land that his government expropriated!

Cowards. Lazy useless thieving lapdog cowards.