Members of the ruling party are happily defending the status quo of the Barbados economy – Nero fiddling while Rome burns.
Maybe they are saying, as the Latin poet Horace would have said, dulce ridentem Barbados amabo, dulce loquentem, judging by the leading spokesmen – I will love thee sweetly smiling, sweetly talking.
But are the citizens sweetly smiling or sweetly talking? Men and women indulge in sweet talk when they are in pursuit of some sweetness. Are we about to be sweetened? Metaphors abound.
We are at the tipping point, some say. The economy is balanced and stable, others say.
What is the point in challenging Standard & Poor’s when an investor is tied to the rating of the investment into which he can put his money? As I have said already, we could talk “hoosey”, it would not change one farthing. Junk bonds are junk bonds. If you were to go into a shop and see a big sign marked Junk, would you patronize that area of the shop? Perhaps if you were a hobo!
Don’t tell the country not to panic and continue doing the things that triggered the panic.
In an article entitled The Temptation, The Act published in July 2009, I said: “Government has just put on the market $100 million of potential debt with the obvious intention of protecting jobs in the hope that the recession will pan out by 2010. That is wishful thinking. Even if it ends in the [United States and Britain], it will be a long time and on different terms that it will be felt in Barbados”. Well the recession is still here.
The analysis given by Government is an amateur one. It is simplistic in order to defend a political stance of not biting the bullet by skirting around the real problem. Cut expenditure. But the Government has Hobson’s choice: heads, I lose; tails, you win.
When we learnt of the downgrade, I remembered Horace’s Ode 1: He who is upright in life and pure of sin . . . (integer vitae sclerisque purus)! Barbadians, on whose education Government is now complaining that it spends too much money, are being given a quiver full of poisonous arrows (sagittis pharetra venenatis gravida) – taxes imposed as a weapon.
The cry from Government is: tell me who to send home.
Of course the Opposition would be foolish to answer. If it did answer, it could say: your election boast was “jobs, jobs and jobs”, so in 2008 you swelled the payroll; now you’re trapped. You cannot cut now. Not with election on your doorstep.
Reminds the Wild Coot of Aesop’s Fable The Ant And The Grasshopper: Que faisiez-vous au temps chaud? (What were you doing when the whether was warm?) Je chantais. (I was singing.) . . . . and bathing their rear ends with taxes, especially rum shops, and poisoning them with BNOC fuel charges.
Horace appealed to Fuscus. He got the name wrong. Fuscus is unmoved. From as early as 2008 I was entreating the Government to take harsh measures in putting the economic structure right. They said that Barbados was a society, not only an economy. Wasn’t it a society before? How come it rated so high on the ladder of Human Development Index?
The politicians feasted on the euphoria of victory. Now the ambrosia tastes bitter. Outside agencies, people who never even managed a rum shop, were able to see our folly; were warning us. Maybe we would not necessary agree with their remedy, but they knew that something was wrong.
There is no use blaming the world crisis; with a population of 280 000, it is a small economy. One thing that the country should be told is “feed yourself”. In his peripatetic perambulations over the last 30-odd years, whichever country The Wild Coot visited, he partook of local fare. So we need, until the crisis is over, to fashion our champagne tastes after our mauby pockets.
Whoever promised us a hospital, please thank them for the gift.
• Harry Russell is a banker.