As the 47th anniversary of the Independence of Barbados approaches, it is necessary for reflection firstly on the “state of the nation”, and secondly on the prescription of “what is to be done”.
In undertaking this effort, however, it is important to avoid the danger of treating the current challenges as merely “episodic” rather than existential, since this will lead to the offering of “technical solutions”, in the place of genuinely transformational objectives.
The first is the purview of the manager, the second is the forte of the leader. In the ongoing crisis of Independence, will a real leader please stand up?
Much of the crisis revolves around the fact that both the external global framework which had provided space for the pursuit of self-determination, and the internal social-democratic strategies and approaches which had defined anti-colonial internal transformation, are being ideologically challenged. The essential challenge of Barbados on the eve of its 47th anniversary of Independence revolves around the exhaustion of the post-colonial development model, and the absence of a sustainable alternative.
This existential crisis is reflected in the reversal and abandonment of the social democratic ethos which had cushioned the ordinary citizen and had ensured his “buy-in” and his sense of legitimacy in the Independence project. Today, in the throes of this existential crisis, nothing familiar appears to be working. Taxation increases, yet Government revenues drop; incentives for investment are increased, yet investment levels diminish; political parties, trade unions and the single territory national formation which emerged with Independence appear hopeless and in need of rethinking.
In such conditions of generalized crisis, limited technical “development” options often prove inadequate. An example of such an overinvestment in a “technical” response was seen in the widely reported set of proposals offered by Dr David Browne to the Democratic Labour Party lunchtime lecture, in which he sought to outline a present-day “nation-building” project for Barbados, which included, among other things, the relocation of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, a housing strategy, and a shift to renewable energies.
While the need to outline a coherent development strategy in the manner in which he presented his arguments is impressive, his prescriptions are in no way necessarily linked to the requirements of Independence, nor do they address the existential crisis. As intelligent and as well thought out as his prescriptions might have been, they represent linear development options, independent of any reformulation of the framework of Independence, in a qualitative manner.
The urgent truth of the moment in which we find ourselves is that only a second Independence revolution can address the challenges of the day. It is the task of all committed Caribbean patriots to first acknowledge the depth of the crisis, and then prepare an unapologetically revolutionary programme for the second Independence revolution, that can sustain the gains and address the deficiencies of the first.
• Tennyson Joseph is a political scientist at the University of the West Indies Cave Hill Campus, specializing in regional affairs. Email tjoe2008@live.com.