The man widely credited with pulling Barbados out of a deep recessionary hole in the early 1990s is questioning how the island got back into the current economic state.
“How did we get here?” former Prime Minister Sir Lloyd Sandiford asked, contending “Everything is out of control” and insisting “it did not happen yesterday”.
Sir Lloyd, in a telephone interview from his home last week, said the major indicators in the economy had been “pointing in the wrong direction for quite some time and suddenly it seems as though we have now awakened as a country to realize that”.
That realization, he opined, was coming only when the problem had reached the point that it was necessary to put even more drastic measures in place “in order to correct something that had been corrected before”.
“I simply reflect upon the situation and I am certainly very much concerned that we have found ourselves as a country in this position when we dealt with most of these issues in the 1990s, and they just have to be corrected,” Sir Lloyd said.
With a hint of disappointment, he pointed out his administration had back then corrected most of those areas that again needed correcting, “from productivity through removing the twin deficits in the budget, to the foreign exchange earning sector”.
