AT the final Free National Movement (FNM) rally on Saturday, Prime Minister Hubert Ingraham made an overt pitch to women voters, particularly mothers, asking them to vote for the ‘FNM Delivery Team’.
In discussing the road improvement project he compared the tangled utility wires found underground with the jumbled up wires women often find in the back of their televisions, emphasising the risk of fire and other serious electrical problems. “You know how frustrating it is to have to untangle all those wires,” said Mr Ingraham, addressing women.
Mr Ingraham took the risk of sounding patronising and explained with new details, the value of the road improvement project and the challenges that come with development. Speaking directly to women, he reframed the roadwork debacle, and he gambled that women would be more willing and able to readily connect with what he had to say.
“I want to speak directly to every mother in this country, including young mothers, and women who are now pregnant. Paving a road does not take a very long time. If that is all we had to do, the roads would have been paved earlier. But it was the work under the road that you can’t see that took most of the time. We found under our roads pipes laid 30, 40, 50 years ago. Many of them were rusted and burst,” said Mr Ingraham.
He told the women it was necessary to label thousands of feet of wires so they would not get twisted up again, and also ‘to dig up and throw out miles and miles of old rotten pipes’.
And then Mr Ingraham attempted to appeal to the provider instincts of women, by apologising for the hardships caused by the roadworks and framing the road issue as the ‘most massive water upgrade’ in the history of the country. He took a gamble, but I think it had some payoff.