Erskine Sandiford
Erskine Sandiford was prime minister of Barbados from June 1987, when Barrow died in office a year after his return, to September 1994, when his own backbenchers voted his government down. He was the schoolmaster and education minister who inherited a party that had just won twenty-four seats of twenty-seven and left it with eight. His seven years were the island's worst since independence and the ones in which its economy was made to work again. The crisis came in 1991. The sugar and the tourism fell together, the reserves ran out, the foreign debt came due. The IMF's terms were the alternative to devaluing the dollar from two to the American, which the island had held since 1975 and which he would not touch. The adjustment was taken in wages instead. The public sector's was cut by eight per cent in October 1991, three thousand jobs gone, the pensions frozen, the value-added tax planned. There were the general strike, the marches of thirty thousand on an island of two hundred and sixty thousand, and the unemployment of twenty-five per cent. The dollar held, the reserves came back, the economy grew again from 1993. The social partnership of 1993 between the government, the unions and the employers, a protocol on wages and prices renewed every few years since, was the thing the island kept from the crisis and still has. The party did not forgive him. A no-confidence motion brought by his own former finance minister in June 1994 passed with the votes of his backbenchers. He called the election. Arthur's Labour Party won it by nineteen seats to eight. He left the leadership and, in 1999, parliament. He was born in St Michael, took his degrees at the University of the West Indies and Manchester. He taught and was Barrow's personal assistant and then a senator. He entered the House in 1971, and was education minister for most of the years between. The National Cultural Foundation and the Crop Over festival are his. He was ambassador to China from 2010 to 2018. He sits in the Senate. He is the prime minister the island has revised its opinion of, upwards, the way islands do once the numbers are in.
- Lived: 1937 CE – ?
- Nationality: Barbadian
- Roles: prime minister, teacher, politician
