BARBADOS NEEDS TO GROW UP. We were kindly encouraged, then gently prodded, and are now being threatened to act our age and behave like a more responsible nation.
With one of the oldest parliaments in the world, and almost 50 years of Independence, we are publicly kicking and screaming that we want to remain among the baby nations of the world. We want more development aid, we want loan interest rates reserved for less developed countries, we want reparations.
At this time in our development, we should have had a tax base that could pay for our development, rather than trying to negotiate the various foreign debt traps. We have embraced and mismanaged the concept of debt financing, and deluded ourselves into thinking that we were in times of plenty when we spent the foreign loans.
We were completely oblivious to the fact that we were drowning in foreign debt while being led, like a kadooment of dancing sheep, to the slaughter.
To have a sufficient tax base, we need a competitive private sector, and private sector professionals are a critical component. However, for the past 15 years, the Government has meddled in the professional services sector of the economy to such an extent that it has become uncompetitive and grossly unfair.
First, the Government inexplicably abolished the only fair regulation that existed for Barbados-based professionals, then they politicised the sector.
There has been a call for doctors and other professionals to pay their fair share. As a direct result of Government’s meddling, some professionals cannot even afford to pay subscriptions to their professional associations. They have paid their fair share many times over through being disqualified from participating in the Barbadian economy by virtue of not being politically favoured, or being denied the opportunity to earn in an unfairly regulated professional services sector.
It has been an intolerable state of affairs for many professionals, especially since the “fatted calf” was inequitably distributed.
Most professional associations are vulnerable to a divide and rule approach. The few politically favoured professionals can easily frustrate the process. Many professionals and their families have had to endure on the sidelines while the game was being played, waiting for the Government to make the mistake of poking the one profession that is indispensable – the doctors.
Caring doctors work long hours caring for our sick and dying residents. With heads bowed over their patients, they are forgiven for not looking around at the scandalous state of non-politically aligned professionals in the Barbados economy – an economy in which we all have an equal right to share.
Let me disclose that I registered with the Barbados Revenue Authority (BRA), paid all outstanding taxes (all of which I was never previously notified that I owed), and received my tax clearance certificate.
I encourage all professionals to do the same. But the doctors must be highly commended for standing up and championing responsible change.
Given their indispensable collective service, theirs is the only profession that can – the rest of us have to lump it. If their action causes the Government to behave better, then it would have been worth it.
– GRENVILLE PHILLIPS II