THE FIRST THREE months of 2017 should have been an exciting time for Barbadians at home and abroad.
After the golden jubilee celebrations that marked 50 years of independence from Britain in 1966, Barbadians should have been thinking of years of prosperity ahead of them. The economy should be moving at a reasonable clip and the social environment making Bajans proud.
With the global economy picking up more steam after years of anemic growth, Barbados should have been on course to benefit from at least three per cent expansion. After all, when the worldwide economy tanked in 2007 and 2008, Barbados’ hit rock bottom. So the reverse should now be a fact of life.
But that’s not the case.
Economic growth hasn’t recovered, debts have piled up so much so that they are now 111 per cent of gross domestic product, one of the world’s highest; the deficit remains stubbornly high, about eight per cent; garbage collection is a problem; turmoil hit the central bank and the law courts had to settle the dispute between the Minister of Finance Chris Sinckler and Dr DeLisle Worrell, the former Governor; Wall Street credit ratings were downgraded again by Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s Investors Service; foreign reserves have plummeted; the water supply, once a source of pride, has become unreliable; potholes are the scourge of our road network; the country owes the University of the West Indies $200 million and can’t or wouldn’t pay; questions arose about the long-term viability of the National Insurance Scheme; Sinckler felt compelled to use the House of Assembly to appeal to the private sector to bring back some of the foreign exchange stored abroad; and the bus transportation system has gone from bad to worse.
They are but a few of the nightmares the country endures.
How come this dramatic fall from grace for a country that was once heralded as the “best run black country in the world”?
Sir Courtney Blackman, a former Central Bank Governor, who remains buoyant about his birthplace’s fortunes, even in the face of such obvious serious setbacks, thinks the answer is straightforward.
“It’s all about the management of our resources, human, financial and otherwise,” was the way he put it a few days ago to BARBADOS BUSINESS AUTHORITY after the House ended its debate on the 2017-2018 Estimates. “When so many things go wrong at the same time, the answer usually revolves around management. In this case, it is a problem of management.”
In his well-written book, The Practice Of Economic Management, A Caribbean Perspective,” Sir Courtney, who went on to become Barbados’ top diplomat in Washington, said “management must be made accountable for results”.
Nowhere is that standard of measurement more relevant than with the more than 60 state enterprises which the government has been vowing to rationalise for years but hasn’t gotten around to holding them accountable for the hundreds of millions of taxpayer money poured into them.
The absence of audited accounts of so many statutory corporations, some going back many years, is symptomatic of the appalling situation, a telltale sign of gross inefficiency, a lack of planning and galloping waste.
“The failure of state-owned enterprises to submit audited financial accounts for years on end is scandalous,” Sir Courtney said, not simply about the agencies in Barbados but across the Caribbean. Of course, any report card on the operations of state enterprises must begin with the role of the cabinet ministers responsible for them.
Owen Arthur, who led the country for almost 15 years ending in 2008, put his finger on a major contributor to the problem of state enterprises when he said recently in New York that Barbados simply has too many of them.
“We don’t need so many,” Arthur told BARBADOS BUSINESS AUTHORITY during a visit to Manhattan where he delivered the keynote address at a symposium sponsored recently by the State University of New York – University of the West Indies Centre. Caribbean economic experts focused attention on the correspondent banking crisis having over the Caribbean like the sword of Damocles.
The axis of the state enterprises problem is ministerial control and lack of accountability. Clearly, it’s not with the model itself. Instead, it is how we are abusing it. Introduced more than 70 years ago to bypass government red tape and speed up decision making, most corporations have become centres of political patronage.
Successive governments have known for decades that far too many of them don’t produce any measurable results but they still feast on public funds.
Next is a failure of ministers to recognise their roles. Instead of outlining goals and establishing parameters for the enterprises while choosing competent managers, the politicians incorrectly set out to become surrogate chief executive officers (CEOs).
“The role of ministers is clear,” insists Sir Courtney. “It is to set goals, select managers on the basis of their capacity to carry out the required task, establish performance criteria; insist on timely reporting, especially of financial results, punish and remove, if necessary, managers who do not perform.”
Unfortunately that’s not the road on which the corporations travel. In its assessment of the island’s performance, S&P seemingly went out of its way to pinpoint state enterprises and their problems when it complained that the government’s “streamlining of state-owned enterprise financing was behind schedule, and their management continues to weigh on Barbados’ fiscal profile.” In other words, many of them are an albatross around the government’s neck. Until we do something about it, the mess will continue.
The root of their problems isn’t the CEOs. It is the political directorate.
“I believe Barbados is one of the best educated countries in the world. It has three secrets – education, education, education,” argued Sir Courtney.
“That’s why I don’t worry too much about Barbados’ future. But we have to pay more attention to our management discipline. Our democratic system of governance puts the authority to correct things in the hands of the voters who will have an opportunity to act at the next election. Naturally, I am saddened by recent developments. Things just haven’t gone well. Still, I am not afraid of the future.”