“When you pray to God you have to be willing to listen to what he has to say and also to have eyes to see and ears to hear.”
Retired West Indies Anglican Bishop and Archbishop, the Most Reverend Drexel Gomez, was commenting on the growing appeals from across the Caribbean for prayers to the Almighty.
The former Bishop of Barbados and the Bahamas was correct when he told the NATION in Brooklyn “it’s not only a matter of throwing up a petition to God. It is a question of being willing to be led and to be guided and directed by what God has to say”.
As more people lose their jobs or feel threatened by the weak economy, they are flocking to their churches, falling to their knees at home or looking skywards in silent or highly vocal appeals as their countries become besieged by crime and violence or hard hit by financial mismanagement.
Last year, more than 1 800 people were murdered in Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana and The Bahamas alone. Crime and violence are another issue altogether. Too many guns, a flood of drugs, high poverty levels and too few police resources chasing an increasing number of bandits and thugs make it extremely difficult for the criminal justice systems to cope.
Take the matter of our fiscal affairs. An archipelago of small countries which have done reasonably well in raising living standards since independence first came to the English-speaking Caribbean in the early 1960s, the states that are facing economic nightmares know what they must do to bring financial order to their affairs. The trouble is that their elected officials don’t have the stomach for the pain that is bound to follow vital steps.
The Archbishop correctly put his finger on the solution when he said “we must have persons in charge of our financial management who are equipped to handle our affairs and who can be innovative in dealing, not only with a crisis, but innovative in the sense of being able to utilize what we have and find ways of adding to what’s possible”.
Certainly, the Almighty can provide the leaders with the intestinal fortitude to take the tough steps needed to turn around the economies. But it remains doubtful that when push comes to shove they will act accordingly.
Aaron Freedman, Moody’s lead analyst for Barbados, said in an interview from his Wall Street office “a reason we left a negative outlook on the recent rating [in Barbados] in place was because we felt there was a risk the Government wouldn’t carry through on its own proposals.”
What it boils down to is that far too many of the region’s leaders are avoiding making decisions, and Barbados is among them.
Clearly, the global financial crisis contributed to the problem by exposing structural weaknesses in Barbados’ economy. But what’s also true is that the Government has failed to address the weaknesses in an aggressive and timely fashion while blaming external forces.
Caribbean leaders and the people who elect them shouldn’t expect prayers to usher in solutions like manna from heaven.
For as the Archbishop insisted, “a part of our problem is a management problem and it’s management with a capital M”. Although we are quite wrong to insist that the phrase “God helps those who help themselves” is scriptural – such a phrase can’t be found in The Bible – we should recall the words of the Greek writer Sophocles in Philoctetes: “Heaven ne’er helps the men who will not act.”
Quite recently, Peter Bunting, Jamaica’s Minister of National Security, appealed for divine help and a heightened role for the church to curb crime and violence there.
What happened next was predictable: an avalanche of criticism, accusing him of surrendering to crime and demoralizing members of the police force.
The truth is that the region must have more trained and better equipped police officers, poverty reduction programmes are vital, more guns must be taken out of the hands of criminals; and there must be improvements in economic and fiscal management. Simply praying for these things will not cut it.
