Government has been told by the Barbados Private Sector Association (BPSA) to act now in implementing decisions on the economy, or some external agency will tell them what to do.
In a frank introductory speech at the one-day Public/Private Sector Consultation at Hilton Barbados, BPSA chairman John Williams said it was time to “tell it like it is” while warning that any further lack of implementation would spell economic doom.
“We must implement our decisions,”?he said. “This is our major failure [and] our presentation … contains specific, actionable recommendations which we wish to see implemented in the short and medium term.”
Stating that the current economic situation was reminiscent of the time of the Social Partnership’s birth in the early 1990s, Williams said the economy was also in difficulty then, but today’s circumstances, in his view, were even worse and the word “crisis” was being used more frequently than ever.
While no previous recession had seemed so protracted, he said, the coping mechanisms being applied in Barbados were not having the desired positive effect, and therefore urgent action was needed.
“The BPSA restates the position which we’ve held for some time now: Barbados must be aware of and guided by what has happened in countries which have failed to take necessary corrective action in a timely manner. We in Barbados must act … ourselves and we must do so with great urgency. If we don’t do it ourselves, some external agency will tell us what to do.”
Williams told the consultation that he was not seeking to scare the nation but to move away from the “sense of complacency, a sense that this is a global problem that we can do little about, a sense that if we wait long enough these global problems will go away by themselves without any need for us in Barbados to change. But they won’t”.(RJ)
Full reports from one-day Public/Private Sector Consultation in tomorrow’s WEEKEND NATION
