What did members of the diverse group of Bajans assembled in a prominent Brooklyn church have in common?
Answer: Concerns about Barbados’ economic and social crisis and a desire to resolve it.
The panellists and the featured speaker ran the gamut from Harold Hoyte, Editor Emeritus of the Nation Publishing Co. Limited and a member of the board of directors of the Barbados Central Bank; Adrian Mapp, mayor of Plainfield in New Jersey; and Oswald Lewis, a former director of management and budget in Norwalk, Connecticut, and treasurer of Friends of Barbados DLP Association; to Laurel Scott, pastor of the United Methodist Church of Port Washington on Long Island and H. Elizabeth Thompson, a former Cabinet minister in Barbados who is now a United Nations adviser.
“I have come to this city at this time and in this [extremely cold] weather to share my concerns about the future of a country we all love very dearly, and to pledge our desire to take it out of darkness into light,” said Hoyte, the featured speaker at a three-hour symposium.
Hoyte told the audience about the twin-crises confronting Barbados.
“We all know Barbados is undergoing an economic crisis,” he said. “But we also have a social crisis. There is troubling evidence of a decline in the high standards which have distinguished us in the past.
“Three recent phenomena have reached alarming proportions in institutional pillars of the society – moral compromise by the churches, bullying in schools and domestic violence at home.”
Hence, his appeal to Bajan-New Yorkers to “pay little more attention” to events at home.
“Politicians have overpampered Bajans into the easy life by encouraging the belief that we have unlimited social entitlements; successive governments try to ‘out-free’ each other – free secondary education, free tertiary, free school meals, free health care, free school uniforms, free kindergarten education, free text books, free bus rides – now we feel Government owes us a free living,” said Hoyte, author of Eyewitness To Order And Disorder.
“We actually believe that the unrealistic exchange rate of our dollar was something we earned. We chose it, but have not been able to justify it so we live with comparatively high wages and prices. And thus we are uncompetitive in what we produce, sell and serve.”
He didn’t stop there.
“We are spoilt to the extent that we complain about every inconvenience, every difficulty, every challenge,” he insisted. “As a society we cannot succeed without sacrifice and productivity. We cannot succeed by sustaining an oversized and underproducing public sector. We cannot succeed if a third of the workforce has an income tax-free existence – I refer to self-employed artisans, cosmetologists, taxi men, marine operators and minibus drivers and the like. We cannot succeed if half of the men between 16 and 28 years of age are encouraged to spend their days sitting under trees smoking weed and shouting obscenities to passers-by, yet being provided for even as they go to the boundaries of secondary schools to proposition teenage girls.”
Hoyte complained that Barbados had become a society where there was a lack of law enforcement, where mediocrity was the new high watermark, and we have a make-do satisfaction level which accepts poor standards of work and personal relations.
“Both major parties are culpable – the BLP [Barbados Labour Party] for its lack of courage during 14 plenteous, happy-go-lucky years in Government to critically examine the sustainability of a politically desirable economic course and do something about it. The DLP [Democratic Labour Party] for six years of inertia and fumbling. The BLP for the public nature of its protracted power struggle since 2010, the DLP for its withdrawal from public discourse when it is most needed,” he said. “The DLP for decisions which took no account of the international reality and made the national situation far worse than it would have been.”
As Mapp saw it Barbados’ problems were “enormous” but not without solutions, one of which was the urgent need for a curbing of conspicuous consumption and ending a gluttonous appetite for imported goods.
“We have gotten accustomed to freeness, free tertiary education and we can’t afford it,” he declared. People must contribute to tertiary level education.”
Scott said a prime focus in Barbados should be “what we can do” as a people to solve the problems.
She urged Barbadians not “to give up” as they grapple with the economic and social problems and insisted that prayer was crucial.
Scott also decried the incidence of domestic violence.
Lewis said that there was need to look at the impact of the public sector lay-offs in a “comprehensive manner”, considering both the fallout on households and on the overall economy.
“The situation in Barbados didn’t begin overnight and it will not be solved overnight,” he said.