AS BARBADOS BRACES for the start of the latest edition of Showdown On Whitepark Road, scheduled for November 11, wherein the best and brightest of our legal profession will go toe-to-toe over whether Banks Holdings Limited (BHL) was legally within its powers to sign a sweetheart contract with a pretty girl called (Am) Bev, the rest of the country seems to be saying “so what”?
This epic courtroom battle will be presided over by the Chief Justice himself and I could swoon over all the legal precedents it might set, one way or the other, and we can all agree that it is really important, not least for the shareholders of BHL.
But I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you I sense a certain level of boredom over the whole thing permeating our atmosphere. The business one, I mean. It’s hard for me to say this, because as a business journalist I am on the one hand champing at the bit about it all, and we could sit and discuss all the issues, great and small, that beg for a ruling, even though only two specific clauses will be ruled on at the conclusion of the matter. But as a member of the public as well, I find myself easily distracted from all the drama. It’s like watching Empire or Scandal. Starts out so full of climactic showdowns that, after a while, you know you can’t take anymore because your adrenaline supply just can’t take so much drama.
Come to think of it, in terms of content, this one may be more like How To Get Away With Murder, by which I mean that highly erudite legal drama starring that incomparable actress. Remember, we have been down this road before, and one of the great characters on the boards at this new go-round is returning for this melodrama. And while they may well win the day (how would I know?) ANSA McAL as the underdog, fighting on behalf of small, downtrodden shareholders everywhere. But I will do my best.
I don’t think I need to go over the scope of the case which Sir Marston Gibson will be looking at – summaries have been all over the news. If you really need to read it up, allow me to shamelessly plug my website www.bsjbusiness.com, where you will find really more than enough background. Instead, allow me to widen the lens for a moment on why we really don’t care that much about this case, and allow me to apologise to the participants and those who are affected, because it really is nothing personal, and I know that the rational side of us does care about the outcome.
But let us “get real”, as the young people say: when the two big sharks are fighting, the little guppies get out of the way. I can remember when just a few years ago, big companies like McAL and Cable & Wireless (C&W), Goddards and Barbados Shipping & Trading were seen as big, but there was some scale to them. There were a group of Mount Hillaby-size corporations, compared to now, when by comparison they are Mount Everests. The scale is not the same. We feel much smaller around them because they have grown so large, mainly by gobbling up the weaker among themselves. So why should we care if another little fella (BHL) gets gobbled up this time?
Did we care about poor old FLOW getting eaten up by C&W, or the latter itself about to become a tea-time snack for the mighty John Malone’s interests? A man who privately owns 2.2 million acres of prime American forests and prairie land just because he wants to? We don’t have anything against them, unless it can be shown that their gobbling will cost us more in the pocketbook as a direct result.
There are fewer corporations running our major services now and there are more of us small people, with our own small businesses, who – like it or not – have to buy services from companies with increasingly worrying near-monopoly positions. There is big capital and there are the rest of us. And whether we should or not, we the latter really don’t care much about the former. So maybe it’s a case of monopoly apathy.
Noteworthy: baby on board
Now if you think I am wallowing in self pity for all the monopolies running our lives, relax: I have learned to love my dependencies, and prefer to notice the small yet big-hearted things in life that make it worth living. One of them occurred a few weeks back on the bus. The big old blue was crowded, it being dinner time and everybody trying to get home to St Philip. But when a young woman came on board with a babe in arms and sat down facing the other side of the bus, the driver issued an edict: the woman must find a seat forward for the safety of said small human. He would wait. Without much discussion, people got up and the lady was settled in a seat facing forward.
I have seen several times when my grandchildren and other people’s young ones have been dragged in to sit between strangers, as it is a given they can’t stand up on a fast moving bus, but this was the first time I experienced this.
Not much talk, not much bother. It was done, and the bus moved off into the night. The Chief Justice’s intervention was not needed.
By the way the bus driver was a young man.
His name is Dale Hall.
