BARBADIANS HAD for many years a reputation for being conservative. For a long time they would not let the old flag fall. The Wild Coot left Barbados when he was 19 tender years, came back when he was 38, spent two years and left again for 26 years. He is therefore not qualified to pontificate on things Barbadian.
What he can report about is what has been told to him by an old lady of 96 years who has never left Barbados and who has kept her ears to the ground. She said that her mother taught her well – home-schooling was not illegal in those days. According to her, Barbados is divided into two societies (now it is three if we include Trinidadians).
There were the merchants who produced and invested locally and there were the workers who consumed and saved for a rainy day. Savings was a special necessity as workers saw it as a means of social enhancement. Barbados acquired a reputation for savings.
The Barbados Savings Bank was evidence of that reputation and later the Barbados National Bank. The merchants who were the investors in the island dominated the other side of social and economic activity. Barbados Shipping & Trading Co. Ltd. (BS&T) featured prominently in this group, but there were others, mainly owners of import businesses and sugar lands.
This division in the cultural and economic activities of the island was in one respect good, but in another respect not so good as it has now led to a dilemma. In came the Trinidadians with “their horde of plate and gold” to take over many of the businesses owned by the local merchants.
This meant that while the merchant class and the workers (savers) had been able to live ostensibly side by side and their ultimate goal was to further the interest of Barbados and Barbadians, the symbiosis was no longer present. Those who have taken over the interest of the Barbadian merchants are mainly Trinidadian and their profits do not necessarily make Barbados greater. As a matter of fact, a social and economic hiatus has ensued.
What has happened to the substantial wealth that should have enriched Barbados on the sale of BS&T and other Barbadian firms? There is no evidence that it was ploughed back into Barbados either by way of savings or investments. There is a huge suspicion that most of it was spirited abroad or never came to Barbados. If either of these two suspicions is correct, it could be the genesis of many of the ills today.
One sector has been accustomed to consumption and savings and has not changed its habit, while the other sector may have parked its wealth abroad. Wealth abroad does not help the country. The pernicious thing is that those who may be keeping their wealth abroad are living off the scraps left in the country.
The Wild Coot was amazed at the perspicacity of the old lady. Her analysis of the present social and economic situation would put esteemed economists to shame.
He remembered gently putting a question to a prime minister. “Why did you sell 49 per cent of the shares of the Barbados National Bank to the Trinidadians?” His answer was: “Bajans would not buy the shares and I wanted money to run the country.” I should have asked: “Did not the people who sold the businesses that prospered on the backs of the workers seek to invest in these shares and all like now obviate the need of the Central Bank to have to send US dollars to Trinidad for bank dividends, food supplies, insurance or for . . . ?”
Poetic justice seems to be taking over. Where to run? Whatever the situation now in Barbados, all classes are subject to debilitating conditions. The “poor” minister of finance does not seem to know which way to turn in the present morass.
How people spend their money is their business. But selling to the Trinidadians has now created a serious dependency on a country that once dismissed the rest of the Caribbean with the famous remark: “We are not an ATM.” Indeed, their present economic difficulties can be ominous for Barbados.
“But Wild Coot,” said the old lady, “we could have kept 51 per cent in the Barbados National Bank and still have a say in where the dividends go. You can’t put all the blame on the merchants.”
Then who else?
Harry Russell is a banker. Email [email protected]
