In the Diaspora (this is one of a series of fortnightly columns from Guya-nese in the diaspora and others with an interest in issues related to Guyana and the Caribbean)
The issue of development challenges goes beyond economistic interpretations of governments, regional organizations and the World Bank. The primary prescription these days is to implement a “strategic agenda for improving competitiveness”. But I have wondered whether the story ends there. My thoughts centre on our weak sense of purpose, deteriorating community values, and a paralytic deficit in democracy.
This year, four CARICOM countries- Antigua and Barbuda, the Bahamas, Barbados, and Trinidad and Tobago- fall into the World Bank’s category of “High Income Countries”. Five- Belize, Dominica, Grenada, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines- qualify as “Upper Middle Income Countries”. And two- Guyana and Jamaica- are “Lower Middle Income Countries”. The GNI pc of Caribbean countries in the first two categories ranges approximately from US$20,000 to US$ 5,000 a year. Even the lower end is more than twelve times greater than the GNI pc of the 40 odd Least Developed Countries of the world. Many of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, relating to , for example, poverty and hunger, primary education, maternal mortality, child mortality, have not only been exceeded, but surpass the indicators even of some developed countries.
So, is it not “time to take in the begging bowl”? Time for us to be mindful of our place in the world? And for the donors, especially the European Commission, to engage in a less self-serving partnership, in a way that strengthens, rather than undermines, the very qualities on which sustainable, competitive, self-reliant development is built?
Most of the income increases in Caribbean countries has come from windfalls- from tourism, and in the case of Trinidad and Tobago from petroleum – without really being put to the test of creating development. Two of these countries aspire to so-called “developed country status” in ten to fifteen years. Yet, it is far from clear what societal values CARICOM countries already have, or aspire to.
If Barbados is the prototype of the future Caribbean economy and a world-class society, we are truly in deep trouble. For the experience of that country (as some other small prosperous States like Iceland and the Spanish Balearic Islands) exemplifies the shortcomings of current conceptions of development, especially in very small States. It faces serious problems that include beach erosion, coastal degradation; the need for more and bigger roads, as the motor vehicle population escalates out of control; a high incidence of obesity and other non-communicable diseases; the need for larger airports, power and sewerage plants, hospitals; mounting pressure on the water supply; increasing dependence on fossil fuels; diminishing land availability for house construction; overvaluation of the exchange rate; loss of competitiveness with very poor service in a services-based economy; and xenophobic attitudes towards fellow Caribbean citizens.
Jamaica has the unenviable distinction of languishing in a state of virtual economic stagnation for some four decades, notwithstanding tens of billions of dollars of external multilateral, bilateral, and private financial inflows. A country you might say that, unlike its antithesis Barbados, tries without succeeding. Its prolonged, crime-riddled stagnation mirrors the poverty of social capital, and the “two Jamaicas” bifurcation that paralyzes that society. In the Eastern Caribbean States the decline of traditional agriculture has weakened community bonds and social networks, and with that such values as reciprocity and trust. The sense of a common purpose appears to be declining, as a mentality of free-riding, and the pursuit of dubious international services take hold.
Caribbean States have made a great virtue of their devotion to the practice of (Western-style) “democracy”- adult suffrage, regular four-yearly general elections, and majority-based representation. But is this light form of democracy well adapted to the needs of all societies, and especially to micro-communities, and societies with sharp racial polarization?
In the micro-communities of Barbados and the Eastern Caribbean States that form of democracy imposes a kind of rigidity that makes it impossible to resolve major cross-cutting problems (e.g. the exchange rate, motor-vehicle congestion and circulation gridlock, the environment, education policy, and waste disposal). Consequently governments avoid tackling crucial and contentious issues, confining governance to second-tier domestic issues and personal spam that assume their own urgency and political heat.
In Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago the existing racial division, in which the two major races constitute near-equal proportions of the population, is a recipe for economic and social paralysis (postponed in Trinidad and Tobago by the insulation of petroleum wealth). No one ethnic group can govern effectively, with the legitimacy that ensures broad-based development, and a secure feeling among all citizens of social and political inclusiveness.
The problems that now lay siege to these micro-States and racially divided societies call for more advanced forms of democratic governance- participatory democracy, societal consensus, abolishing class stratification into governors and the governed, politicians and citizens, the government and opposition. For the truth is that in these micro and racially divided States, politics and what we now call democracy so often result in a citizenry, in an “opposition”, in an under-class of the governed, that has little voice, and, indeed, sometimes no voice at all.