As both Trinidad & Tobago and Jamaica have been celebrating fifty years of independence this month, the rich results of their countries’ participation in the recently concluded London Olympic Games will undoubtedly have brought a welcome relief to their citizens, and even more importantly, to their governmental leaderships. For it must seem that prior to the achievements of their athletes in London, the politicians, in particular, must have felt clouds of gloom descending, as they and their citizens contemplated the present state of things – both economic and political – in their jurisdictions.
Jamaica has been struggling over the last few years, under the administrations of both major parties to come to agreements with the IMF that can lead to some form of fiscal rectitude, reduction of debt, and a halt to declines in economic growth. At times it has appeared that the possibilities of agreement are completely out of sight. Under the previous Jamaica Labour Party, the government gained plaudits for its negotiation of a Debt Exchange Agreement that might lift the persistent restrictions on available capital for domestic investment. But that achievement did not eventually facilitate a standing agreement with the IMF.
A Peoples National Party government, then promising better results while in opposition, has so far not had any better to show to the population from its ongoing discussions with the Fund. Only slight relief has come with a movement of economic growth figures from a -1.2% in 2010 to a positive 1.6% in 2011, for which the new government can hardly claim responsibility. And on the political side, only this week, the noted political science academic and sometime political aspirant Professor Trevor Monroe, has been bewailing that “a major contributor to Jamaica’s non-performance has been and continues to be corruption.”
In Trinidad, the retirement of the country’s long-standing Central Bank Governor, Dr Ewart Williams, has given him an opportunity to lament the country’s restrictive economic growth rate of -1.4% for 2011. He took the opportunity too, to wonder “whether oil and gas can continue to play the dominant role that it has played in the past,” production of both being down on the previous financial year. And in the process he used the word ‘slump‘ to describe the present state of the economy, a description that proved quite unpopular among his fellow citizens.
To add fuel to the fire, he wondered aloud whether in the context of increasing oil supplies in “African countries”; and whether in view of the fact that “regional countries such as Guyana, Suriname and Belize” were “discovering significant oil supplies, we may not be the first priority again.”
So the fact that the Olympics suggested some degree of what we might call increasing productivity in the sports arena of those countries, and especially Jamaica, has quite clearly served to lift the gloom, not only in respect of failing economic productivity, but also in relation to the persistent growth in crime activity, responses to the latter tending recently to take the form of firings of those at the top of the police systems, with the apparent objective of shifting the blame from the political leaderships.
These leaderships in both countries have clearly been happy to join their populations in their rapid shift from despondency to exhilaration about the results in London. The triumph of their Olympians has allowed them to weld themselves to the athletes, and to the citizens in their collective moments of expressions of joy; and to put behind them gloomy thoughts about day-to-day realities.
The results have shown too, that there is something of consequence to be seen, and to celebrate, after fifty years of independence much disturbed by political contention and periodic, but frightening, civil commotion. Recall the Black Power cum military uprising threat to the government of Trinidad & Tobago in 1970 and the subsequent Jamat-al-Muslimeen assault of 1990; and in Jamaica the Rodney demonstrations of 1968, and last year’s US-Dudus extradition event that seemed to threaten not only civic disorder in the capital, but the country’s much-prized relationship between Jamaica and the United States.
Both countries are, of course, not first-time winners at the Olympic Games. And it is probably true to say that there has been a deliberate attempt over the years in Jamaica, going back to the victorious team of Arthur Wint and his colleagues’ victories in the 1948 Olympics and subsequently, to ensure that the promotion of competitive athletics was vigorously pursued. The most recent commitment to a systematic programme of sports development at the country’s University of Technology is very much indicative of this.
Such developments would appear to be less systematic in Trinidad & Tobago, but there is no doubt that there is strong sentiment in that country that the 1976 success of Hasley Crawford, and in more recent memory of Ato Boldon, should stand as salutary examples to the youth as to what can be achieved.
But more than that, in both countries, there has been over the years a strong sense that not only exertion in sports, but also strong commitment to the arts, should be an area of choice for global pursuit and identification. Jamaica’s successes in this area are well known, and have been celebrated in the early promotion of music, in the 1960s, by eventual Prime Minister Edward Seaga, and by Professor Rex Netteford’s National Dance Theatre. And in Trinidad, even preceding the Jamaican musical successes have been the internationalization of calypso and the steel pan, the work of the dancer and folklorist Beryl McBurnie, and more recently of Pat Bishop, musician and founder of the Lydian Singers group.
So even as we recognize the current difficulties of both of those countries, including the attempts in Trinidad & Tobago to work through, somewhat later than Guyana, the functioning of mutli-racial, multi-cultural politics, and the depth of the economic difficulties in Jamaica in an unhelpful global economic environment, and the attempts by governments to bask in the glory of the Olympic successes, we cannot but join them, as we must Grenada as well, in their Olympic successes.
Indeed, as is evident in various journalistic references in the last two weeks, it is the wider Caribbean and Caricom that are the beneficiaries, in terms of the positive global notoriety, that inevitably flows from the athletes’ performances.
