AS PART OF OUR golden jubilee Independence celebrations, we’ve been treated via the media to a number of “titbits” relating to our history.
A recent one indicated that the Rt Excellent Errol Barrow “found Barbados a collection of villages and transformed them into a proud nation”.
If we consider what’s happening in our society now despite the “development” and high level of education – the greed, domestic and child abuse, other crimes, rumours of corruption, selfishness, indiscipline and one might even say the disintegration of our social and moral fabric – we could conclude that retaining the “village” way of life rather than today’s heights and terraces and imported lifestyles mightn’t have been a bad thing. And no reason why they couldn’t be proud.
We seem to be at our wits’ end in finding solutions to these problems, but it’s often been said that most begin with the home and family and that it “takes a village to raise a child”. Well, without the village or community mentality, nowadays, everyone paddles their own canoe, often not very successfully, as is evident from the outcome. This rush to reach “developed country” status seems, in some ways, to have done us more harm than good.
I suppose it all began with the move away from local government, under which people felt they were part of what was happening in their parish and they had a say in how their allocation of taxes was spent. Now everything goes into a large impersonal pot (or maybe pit would be more appropriate), with the benefits sometimes doubtful. While there’s been a move to re-create this togetherness via Constituency Councils, I doubt they’ll bring about the desired effect.
We talk about pride, but this seems to be less and less evident as time goes on. The operative words now are “free” and “what’s in it for me”. I seem to recall hearing a feature on Dame Billie Miller a few weeks ago in which she said that under her National Insurance portfolio decades ago, her proposal to establish an unemployment benefit, albeit forward-thinking, was met with comments like, “Why do we need an unemployment benefit? Do you think we’re a bunch of Andy Capp people?” Today the question would be, “How soon will it start?”
We continually boast about our freedom, but there have been some interesting, albeit surprising, comments made by callers to the popular radio programme. Some claim that Clement Payne and General Bussa would have met with so many roadblocks if they were living today that they could never have achieved what they did in those early days. Whether or not you agree, it’s food for thought.
Then there was the clip about National Hero Samuel Jackman Prescod who, “recognising the power of the pen, used the newspapers, of which he was editor, to write scathing articles accusing the planters of pursuing policies which suppressed Blacks and so made freedom unimportant”. . . It is no wonder that historians argue that he was more effective as a journalist than as a Member of the House of Assembly”.
The question is, are present-day journalists allowed such latitude or are they constrained by the ever-looming Defamation Act? The final report of the International Press Institute (2012), published after its visit to Barbados, states that the DLP administration established an Advisory Board on Governance, one of the tasks of which was to amend the 1997 Defamation Act to allow absolute freedom of speech when the target of the remarks was a public figure. The head of that Advisory Board reportedly told the Advocate newspaper, “The Defamation Act as it stands at the moment really forbids the expression of opinion. It also makes you guilty until you’re proven innocent.”
Furthermore, the 2012 report quotes Prime Minister Stuart as insisting on the importance of allowing journalists to carry out their work freely and of holding public officials to a higher burden of proof in defamation cases. He noted that his party’s electoral manifesto had stressed that, due to their level of responsibility, politicians must be exposed to public scrutiny.
“We were interested in making sure that journalists could do their work, examine public officials,” he explained.
To date we haven’t seen these promised changes to the act, neither have we seen the integrity legislation, nor the Freedom Of Information Act. Are we so free after all?