We are now almost four and a half years into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and we are yet to see the official political leadership of Barbados concentrating their intellectual resources and buckling down to the task of producing a concrete and detailed rescue plan for the Barbadian people and economy!
The Barbados Labour Party (BLP) did not do it during their final months in Government, nor have they done it during the four years that they have spent in Opposition.
Likewise, the Democratic Labour Party (DLP) did not do it during their final months in Opposition – they spent their time trying to bamboozle the electorate with extravagant promises and election spending – and came to power without having worked out a coherent programme for governing the country.
Truly, Barbados is suffering the tragic misfortune of being governed by the most irresponsible and visionless group of Government and Opposition politicians in its modern political history.
With every passing day, Barbadian citizens are seeking out senior members of the People’s Empowerment Party (PEP) and pleading with us to help the nation to craft a way out of its economic and political dilemma.
Over the past five years we have recommended numerous proposals to extricate Barbados from the economic crisis. A few of our key economic ideas are as follows:
(1) Reduce the fiscal deficit by restructuring the Government budget, while maintaining essential welfare programmes that alleviate human distress and preserving our hard won social rights.
(2) Ease the pressure on small businesses and households by establishing a “Comprehensive Incomes And Prices Programme” (CIPP) that is much broader and more sophisticated than the Social Partnership.
(3) Utilize savings garnered from participation in Venezuela’s Petro Caribe programme to provide credit to Barbadian manufacturers, farmers and small businesses, with interest rates of no more than one or two per cent.
(4) Establish a new partnership in planning and execution between Government and the privately owned productive sectors, designed to invent comparative advantage through the use of state power.
(5) Establish a national “Employee Share Ownership Programme” (ESOP), to broaden the base of ownership and give employees a second stream of income.
(6) Identify a specific national economic mission for Barbados and mobilize the entire population to achieve it, and a concrete economic development project for CARICOM – perhaps a food production initiative – and mobilize all member states to invest in and own it.
So the economic ideas are there. But the political issue remains: how does Barbados establish a national “politics of inclusion” that takes us beyond the petty DLP / BLP squabbles and the marginalization of much of the policymaking talent in the country?
Only you, the people of Barbados, by your actions and interventions, can solve this dilemma.
