Because no man is an island, even in this region of small post-colonial outposts in which we hold together or drown separately; the deaths during the past week of the Hon. A.N.R. Robinson, former president of Trinidad and Tobago and of Professor Norman Girvan, the Jamaican-born academic, touch and concern us deeply.
Both gentlemen made major contributions to the region and to the wider world. Their contributions remind us all the smallness of one’s country is not a handicap to achieving great things. President Robinson, for example, was a driving force behind the formation of the International Criminal Court. And so while one made his mark in the field of politics; the other carved his niche in the world of academia and ideas.
In life, they were fine examples for our younger people to emulate. In death their legacies of service to country and region will live as important testaments of lives purposefully lived. Both entered this world when the region was gripped in the iron hoops of under-development and poverty which made for a life that was not as easy for social and economic advancement as is now enjoyed.
The lesson for all of us in these challenging times is that the struggle continues. Advances made cannot be taken for granted because setbacks and reversals of national fortune may attend us if our leaders are not alive to the constant challenges, of one sort or other, which have the capacity to diminish the standard of living of all our people.
Hence the relationship between the worlds of politics and academia is symbiotic, since the writings and enquiry of the academic often illuminate the dark corners of the practicality of policy for which the politician is grateful since he does not have the freedom of time
to fully explore even some very useful ideas.
The writings and ideas of Professor Girvan and his colleagues therefore become very useful to the world of politicians. Caricom Secretary General Irwin Laroque remarks that Girvan’s “ideas and ideals placed him in the upper echelons of Caribbean intellectuals . . . and that his life’s work was underlined by unremitting dedication to a vision of an integrated Caribbean.”
In this country, we have had the pain of losing three prime ministers in a relatively short time, and earlier this year we lost one of our sharpest young economists, Professor Roland Craigwell, to the grim reaper. A decade earlier we lost another brilliant and public-spirited economist in Wendell McClean.
So as we share the especial pain that our neighbours in the twin-island republic and the land of wood and water feel; it is attenuated by the fact that the lives of these men started within different generations all converged at the point that they were committed to making contributions to enhance the public good. And did so.
There can be no finer fitting tribute to President Robinson and Professor Girvan, than to record that this region’s development has been forever enriched by their contributions.
