With an election due in the next few months, all the buzz is about privatization.
Understandably. Government in Barbados is bloated, slow and inefficient.
But to get to the root of the problem rather than deal with symptoms, we must first have a clear idea of what should be the purposes and functions of a Government of Barbados in the 21st century.
The problem is that Government has grown haphazardly and acquired a hodgepodge of functions that are either no longer relevant or better undertaken by other entities.
Over 20 existing statutory corporations or departments could be abolished, put on a different legal footing or contracted out to the private sector.
How did this get so? Several reasons:
1) institutional inertia, which lets activities persist long after they have ceased to be useful;
2) political patronage, which inspires politicians to propose financially irresponsible initiatives to garner votes;
3) the ingrained habit of heads of ministries and departments to ask for more staff when that, far from resolving internal problems, simply compounds them;
4) the greed that makes the better-off among us insist on receiving free Government benefits that we know to be financially unsustainable and which we can afford to at least partially pay for; and
5) the lack of the equivalent of the market discipline that normally punishes businesses that make bad decisions.
When we talk of reforming Government we tend to think of making it more efficient. But why on earth would you want to make the Barbados Agricultural Development and Marketing Corporation more efficient when there is no reason for it to exist?
Solution? Empower a small group of creative thinkers to decide and design, without reference to existing Governmental institutions, what precisely should be the purposes and functions of Government in Barbados in the 21st century, by what entities those functions should be carried out and how those entities should be structured. Then a plan for how to get from A to B.
This should be easy to do since we have a philosophical consensus on the role of Government. Most Barbadians believe that the business community is the engine of growth that creates prosperity and that Government’s role is to defend the common good, guarantee social justice, facilitate growth and preserve economic and social stability.
If you take this shared philosophy into account, along with the existence of our unique Social Partnership and our small size, we’re well poised to undertake a systematic re-examination of governance and put in place structures appropriate for the 21st century.
This should result in a 20 per cent reduction in the cost, and a 15 per cent reduction in the size, of the public sector. This can be done humanely, under the auspices of the Social Partnership, over five to ten years with minimal mandatory layoffs. In order to prevent future automatic growth you can peg employment in the public sector to a percentage of the labour force.
But such a re-examination and redesign of governance must not be limited to the public sector.
It must also encompass the business community and the trade union movement. Trade unions must take a forward-looking view of protecting workers’ rights and become cooperative partners with business in removing all labour restrictive practices, increasing national productivity, and creating more employment opportunities, profit-sharing and worker participation programmes.
Barbadian businesses suffer from the lack of discipline that a fully competitive market would bring. The last thing many look to for increasing profits/decreasing costs is using their imagination to do things differently. The Government must therefore encourage much greater competition both from local and foreign enterprises and exercise extreme caution in protecting or subsidizing any business activities whatsoever.
We can’t create entrepreneurs or innovators: they emerge by identifying market opportunities and taking the risk to exploit them.
But if we get governance right, entrepreneurs will flourish, workers will find jobs and all Barbadians will enjoy greater material prosperity and spiritual well-being.
We can be firm craftsmen of our fate.
• Peter Laurie is a retired diplomat and commentator on social issues.
