Independent analysts and editorial writers got it right. As 2016 beckoned a year ago, the prognosticators in the United States Britain, Canada, China, Barbados and elsewhere rubbed their crystal ball and came to a prediction: the next 12 months would be a time of mixed fortunes.
Now, as we welcome 2017, there is something we know: the past year brought joy, pain and in some ways indifference.
Take the case of the economy. America’s economic picture continued to look and feel better, albeit at a two per cent pace. Joblessness fell to its lowest in 2016 since the onset of the Great Recession in 2008; global investment gathered additional steam; and the cost of oil and gas continued its downward trend, providing Barbados and its neighbours, with the exception of Trinidad and Tobago, much relief.
Unfortunately, Barbados’ gross domestic product didn’t realise any appreciable benefit from foreign advances, so much so that as we said goodbye to 2016, Barbadians weren’t any better off today than a year ago. The reasons run the gamut from poor leadership; inefficient management and low productivity; to declining infrastructure; a monstrous debt; and increasing allegations of corruption.
But if there was anything to cheer about, it was the international community’s ability to implement a climate change pact endorsed in Paris towards the end of 2015. The United Nations took a crucial step in New York in 2016 that breathed more life into the environmental pact and barring any dramatic shifts in policy by the greatest contributors to climate change, the planet may be on the road to being saved from its own man-made disaster.
Barbados, through Selwin Hart, head of the UN secretary general’s climate change support team but who is now the island’s top diplomat in Washington, helped fashion the pact.
If that wasn’t enough, the US and Cuba opened diplomatic outposts in their capitals and broke down barriers to trade and cultural exchanges. It was a decisive move which told the world that much better relations were on the horizon and that chances of a reversal to the poisonous climate which had kept them apart were highly unlikely. Barbados and its Caribbean neighbours could justifiably take some credit for the thaw in relations.
A key chapter in US President Barack Obama’s legacy in the White House will be his enlightened Cuban policy, which ended more than 50 years of unfathomable pretence that Cuba didn’t belong to the Western Hemisphere family of nations. Perhaps in 2017, Barbados and others in CARICOM would spearhead efforts designed to welcome Cuba back into more institutions that allow it to function as a full member of the Inter-American system.
But the realisation of that goal would depend on the new commander-in-chief, Donald Trump who in late January will succeed Obama as the 45th president of the US.
Obama’s departure and the death of Dr Fidel Castro, who led Cuba for decades, shouldn’t lead to a return of the awful atmosphere that helped to spawn the Cubana airline terrorist bombing by Cuban exiles in 1976 that brought death to the skies and waters of Barbados.
Trump’s presence in the White House follows his surprise election victory over Hillary Clinton. Now, an uncertain climate has descended on many parts of the US and in most countries as people worry. Such fears are everywhere in the Caribbean diaspora across the US.
The US Supreme Court weakened presidential authority when it couldn’t muster a majority to reject a plea by conservative litigants and politicians who argued that Obama had exceeded his constitutional authority by shielding as many as five million undocumented immigrants from the Caribbean, Latin America, Europe, Africa, and elsewhere from deportation.
Obama’s reasoning was right on the money: the foreign born should be given the traditional opportunity to pursue the American dream which hundreds of millions before them had done with alacrity and success.
But the court wasn’t on the wrong side of every constitutional standard. That became clear when it decided that race-conscious admission programmes used by colleges and universities were legal under the equal protection clause of the American constitution.
In short, the judges struck an important blow in favour of affirmative action that ensures a considerable measure of fairness in the education process across the land. Tens of thousands of West Indians – Barbadians among them – have benefitted from affirmative action.
Now, with Trump in the White House, Caribbean countries are holding their collective breath about the future. But what’s not about to change in the English-speaking region is the commitment to democratic principles as seen in general election in Jamaica and St Lucia during the year. Both Jamaica and St Lucia changed governments without a bullet being fired.
But political events didn’t go smoothly in Haiti where amidst concerns about a cholera epidemic that killed thousands, the high winds and rains of Hurricane Matthew and the concerns about who should run the nation of ten million left the 200-plus year republic without an elected president until voters were able to elect a new president recently.
Haiti ended the year with the satisfaction and a hint of compensation after the UN was forced by the power of international public opinion to concede that its soldiers from Nepal had introduced the deadly disease of cholera into the country shortly after the 2010 disastrous earthquake.
The UN in New York under a new secretary general must now provide the financial and technical resources to help Haiti grapple with the cholera epidemic which is still taking people’s lives.
In Washington in 2016, the passage of the US-Caribbean Strategic Engagement Act by Congress and the successful efforts that resulted in the New York State legislature approving a $15 per hour minimum wage are balancing out many of the aches, pains and disappointments of 2016.
Thousands of Bajan-New Yorkers are among the 2.5 million low-income earners who will have larger pay cheques as a result of the increased minimum wage.
“We helped to campaign for the increase in minimum wage,” explained Earl Phillips, a Barbadian who is the secretary/treasurer of the influential Transport Workers Union that represents more than 35 000 mass transit workers.
What a year of mixed outcomes.
