Weekly Column

In 1994 when a newly elected Barbados Labour Party assumed office, then Prime Minister Owen Arthur took a decisive first step in his journey to turn around an economy battered by the mismanagement of the Democratic Labour Party. He asked the resident IMF representative in Barbados to return to Washington and allow him to manage the affairs of our country. The rest as they say is history.

With skillful management and hard work, Arthur and his team set about creating over 30,000 jobs for Barbadians that was to become the bedrock of our economic revival. Our standard of living increased, small and large businesses flourished, there was a cultural renewal and Barbados once more became the envy of the world for what commentators termed our ‘quality of life.’

That fourteen-year journey was not all smooth sailing however. There were plenty of challenges along the way, from SARS and 911 to the OECD blacklisting of Barbados and the collapse of the dot com bubble. Irrespective of what challenges we faced, as a nation there was always the feeling that someone was at the wheel - that there was a purpose to the policies and actions being pursued by Owen Arthur.

Today, with a new man at the helm, the same certainty and confidence is missing. We seem to lurch from one policy to another - the shards of one idea thrown together with another with no cohesion or cohesiveness. There is an absence of an underpinning economic strategy or philosophy. There is in its place a series of populist measures that cannot revive or sustain economic growth but seem focused only on the government’s re-election chances. So we must ask ourselves where do we go from here?

Do we once more cede our economic independence to the dictates of the international moneylenders? Shall we become so enmeshed in trying to save CLICO that we put our own survival in peril? When will stopgap measures be replaced by firm initiatives to create new jobs, attract new investment and get the economy moving again? How soon can we expect to learn from the Minister of Finance precisely what his plan is to return our country to a path of growth that once more allows Barbadians to fulfill their dreams?

Our leader Mia Amor Mottley has been at pains to point out that the government’s ‘wait and see’ attitude is the wrong medicine for what ails the economy. It is akin to giving sugar water to a patient in cardiac arrest. Not only will it do nothing to relieve the complaint, but is likely to cause further complications.

We saw this when she warned that the government’s sloth in responding to the initial crisis last year put us further behind the eight ball than we needed to have been. We moved too late to secure our tourism and investment markets. Projects ground to a halt and with them the jobs of thousands of Barbadians, present and future.

She then urged the government to implement a stimulus programme and after initial denial of its necessity they responded grudgingly with an existing road works programme and proposed a slew of new school fences.

When she told the Prime Minister in March it was time to execute a stabilization programme, given the massive hemorrhage of foreign reserves, like Peter he denied for the third time that there was a problem.

Well there can be no denial now. The Barbados economy is in dire straights.

Miss Mottley and the Barbados Labour Party will continue to show the government and Barbadians that there are options available to arrest our demise and return us to a safer, surer path.
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