In his most recent Sunday Stabroek column, ‘Negotiating the coalition,’ Ralph Ramkarran lays out a scenario for a possible coalition government, if the PPP/C were to win executive power with a plurality but not a majority of the votes in the next general election. Whatever the merits of his hypothesis, initial reactions would seem to be more focused on Mr Ramkarran’s musings on the nature and implications of minority governments and coalitions rather than on the key policy issues raised by the ex-PPP grandee. The latter are, perhaps, worthy of some discussion.
Mr Ramkarran advises the opposition parties to strategise on the back of “the basic policies that they would want all parties joining a coalition government to be committed to.” He posits, “The most important would be economic policies” and these would include economic diversification, value-added production, tourism and infrastructure development, particularly the road to Lethem and a deep water harbour. In addition to this focus on development, he suggests addressing corruption and tax evasion, even as he advocates a comprehensive social policy and the need to find a way to “increase salaries, spend more on reducing crime, on reducing poverty and in particular extreme poverty” while “reducing VAT and other taxes.”
The former Speaker of the National Assembly does not exactly present a socio-economic manifesto for our consideration but he is on the right track. To his shortlist of issues we might add, but not necessarily limit ourselves to, an investment strategy, business facilitation and job creation; demographic policy, including immigration and remigration matters, aimed at reversing the brain drain; climate change, sea defences and flood control; and finding the right balance between natural resource development and environmental protection and conservation.
All this and more would, of course, have to be pursued within a framework of respect for the rule of law, transparency and accountability, a commitment to good governance and the provision of efficient public services. And all this is also, obviously, a big ask for any government in the current political climate of distrust and polarisation.
It is a truism that the role of government and governance is to build trust and forge a united society as a prerequisite for development. No country, least of all a poor, underdeveloped one such as ours, can afford to have sections of the population believing that they are an underclass or so marginalised that they only feel disaffected, discontented or downright rebellious.
It is a challenge that should not be underestimated, for even in a highly developed country like the USA, we have recently been seeing how a history of exclusion, deep-seated frustrations and instances of real and perceived discrimination can boil over into protest and violence.
In Europe, particularly, northern Europe, social policy has tended towards welfare. But this is not necessarily the answer in the under-resourced, less developed countries of the Caribbean.
Take Trinidad and Tobago, for example, where the state has had fuller coffers than most in the region. There, social programmes, driven by populist politics and dominated by handouts and make-work schemes under successive governments, have contributed to under-employment, under-productivity and dropping growth rates. As both the IMF and that country’s private sector have warned, public money would be better spent if redirected to training, education and new job creation, in order to boost productivity, diversify the economy and promote sustainable growth.
Singapore, on the other hand, for many years now a point of comparison for Caribbean countries since independence, has left the region far behind in terms of socio-economic development, mainly by investing in its people, giving them the education, the jobs and the wherewithal to own property and have a direct stake in the country’s stability and development.
To put it simply, our basic development policy should focus on projects to create jobs for the unemployed and on attracting and fomenting businesses that move away from commodity production into value-added economic activity. At the same time, we should recalibrate our education system to equip all our youngsters with the skills they need to make them employable in a transformed economy and to encourage them to stay in the country once they find better paying jobs.
For too long, too many of our politicians have been obsessed with power and the politics of development rather than focusing their energies on more enlightened policies for equitable and inclusionary development. Whenever elections are to be, we, the people, need to hear more from the different parties about concrete and viable plans for the nation’s socio-economic development and we need to make it clear that we are not going to be pacified with patronising platitudes and pie in the sky plans.
