It must be extremely difficult to be placed in the position that the average Barbadian finds himself in as the door of the New Year swings open before us.
The country is desperately short of money, and international agencies such as Standard & Poor’s and the International Monetary Fund seem to have lost confidence in our economy and in us as a once competitive small developing country.
Barbadians are feeling significant pressure as individuals. Available income is not radiating throughout the society, and it is becoming extremely difficult to establish the difference between the poor and the vulnerable middle class, while it is becoming apparent that there are very few wealthy (in the true sense of the word) black Barbadians left among us. We are experiencing super wealthy imports emerging at all religious and highly visible ethnic levels.
Fifty years ago, the Barbadian social environment was prepared for the transition from tradesman to manufacturer. Our young men were trained as furniture makers or joiners and wrought iron men while young women were being taught to become competent in sewing or needlework at the House Craft Centre. In many cases, their highest academic achievement was sixth standard.
When the transition was being made from the cane field, these hands-on trained men and women, guided by society and ‘PAIRents’, recognised the value of their practical education and realised that they had the ability to supply local stores with the stock they needed.
From here grew a lucrative manufacturing industry, completely outfitted by competent workers, managers and artistic designers. Learning a trade was now being seen as the stairway to success away from the ever-seeking to embrace clutches of poverty.
Our lucrative manufacturing industry began to experience difficulties when the factories began to embrace a new management culture. The simple men and women management teams were being told they needed a new branded team to handle the large accounts they were dealing with – the joiner did not fully understand CIF, FOB or letters of credit and these were words that were cropping up more and more in their daily business cycle.
The practical managers were being replaced and with this the real practical worker was also being replaced by – trained for management and not for work – office-oriented, perk-motivated individuals who did not see his role – and at that time it was his role – as a company builder, but as a creator of avenues to ensure his personal success, using each position as a stairway to his self-centred pinnacle on the hierarchy of needs.
The workers at management and lower levels have all but slowly disappeared. The fork and hoe on worksite management has been replaced by office-oriented, rhetoric-inflated amateurs with no hands-on experience, floating in air-conditioned, big-ride luxury, while that for which they have been made responsible and well renumerated continues to decline, whether at government, management, social or religious levels.
In 2015 something must be done to halt the slide. We must return to practical education; step off the balloons filled with masters and doctorates of hot air and seek to stop the never-ending rhetoric and regain the reigns of once emerging, now word-shackled independence, where the economic environment once allowed us to look into the mirror at our Barbadian selves with pride and industry, not allowing ourselves to be brainwashed by violent episodes of CSI, Stalkers, NCIS and Criminal Minds designed to wash away our once treasured morals of basic enshrined decency, destroying what our – until just 40 years ago – foreparents were building in us.
Let 2015 be the period where true Barbadian men and women work together to genuinely set us once again on the path to regain our compromised but not forever lost pride and industry fought for by our National Hero Bussa, and the many others who worked and died to give us a better Barbados.
Remember, we must not be ashamed to give, but we must be willing to take back if the need arises.
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