Are we there yet?

Today was meant to be that day when, on this page, we were all to embark on a long maxi taxi ride to an undetermined destination. It was going to be one of those bigger minibuses packed to capacity with a rowdy bunch all wishing to choose radio stations or take turns at the wheel – including those without driving permits or knowledge of how stick shift works.

There are some who, upon recognising they are probably on the wrong bus, and with a bell that does not work, end up shouting at the top of their voice: “Bus stop, Drive!!!”

The first time, about half mile away from the desired destination, the instruction is followed by a hiss and a cranking and a screeching before the bus stops, the back door opens “clatacks” and two or three passengers disembark in the middle of nowhere.

The second time it happens, a now more keyed-in driver hits the brakes hard and those at the back are transferred like missiles to the front of the bus, and two front seat passengers suffer chipped teeth and busted lips on the windscreen.

One guy, in khaki shorts, sandals and socks, threatens to sue. The lady with the broad straw hat and North American accent is on her phone: “Come and get me now! And, no, I don’t know ‘exactly’ where I am!”

“And, by the way, where am I???!!!”

The guy who wants to sue, eventually pulls the driver away from the wheel and takes control. There is loud applause. But the hard right the new driver takes leads to inappropriate contact involving a fat guy and a young lady in short shorts across the aisle with eyes fixed for hours on her phone. “Sorry. Sorry,” the man lies. The fight does not last long.

On more than one occasion, when we stop, we have to reverse as some poor soul has merely come off to pee before rejoining the cacophonous rhythm section at the back of the bus. Then, when he returns, the arguments resume about who needs the windows open and who prefers them closed with air conditioning.

About two hours into the trip, while the maxi is at full pelt, a child sticks her head outside and a bug flies in her eye. One guy (who everybody knew got on without paying) encourages the mother to bend the child’s head backward, keep the eyelid open between index finger and thumb … and blow hard. Then comes a loud yelp, followed by the screams of a child with a bug stuck, away from non-surgical human access, beneath her eyelid. “Pour water! Pour water!” comes smug front seat advice.

Then, during one rare moment of relative silence: “Mister, Mister,” a tiny child across the aisle turns tearily to me, “are we there yet?”

There is no truthful answer to the question. The maxi taxi, now on driver number six, is hurtling, brakeless, through a crowded market street. “Bus stop, Drive! Oh Lord! Bus stop!!!”

Yes, today, was the day to write about that fateful maxi taxi trip to nowhere in particular. Perhaps it was the occasion when we finally answer the little boy’s question, or at least have our bearings right and know where, on the journey, we have reached.

I wrestled sleeplessly with the metaphors. The storyline. How would it all end? Whose turn was it at the steering wheel. All of that.

But then, on Sunday, came the news that Desmond Tutu had died. For sure, on the imagined maxi taxi, I had more than once flicked to the “Library” folder on my Kindle to find The Book of Joy – author Douglas Abrams’ reflections on a weeklong joint conversation with the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Tutu. It’s not my regular kind of reading, but there it is between Baldwin and Neruda.

“He is much more cerebral,” Abrams remembers Tutu saying of the Dalai Lama. “I am more instinctual.”

“I guess,” Abrams surmises, “even great spiritual leaders get nervous when they are journeying into the unknown.”

Hmm. “Journeying into the unknown.” There’s our maxi taxi!

In the book, the Dalai Lama speaks of the “destination(s) of life.” Tutu notes: “Nothing beautiful in the end comes without a measure of some pain, some frustration, some suffering. This is the nature of things. This is how our universe has been made up.”

In a sense, lesser mortals on the maxi taxi reflect the same tensions. Are we there yet? Maybe that’s not the question. Maybe the real question has to do with destination. Not here, in the middle of nowhere.

Boofs and licks like peas

There used to be a photograph making the rounds on social media of a woman in full-fledged delivery of a non-verbal boof/bouf/bouffe to a child in the midst of a church service.

It reminded me of my mother because my mother was a boss at this. She would tilt her head downward then look up and sideways at you with her eyes open wide … unblinking. Her lips stuck to each other, the sides curved upward and wrinkled as with a fake smile.

It was the kind of lip position that catered for a through-the-lip steups if required. If she shook her head just once, fully expect prompt delivery of charge, verdict, and punishment back home.

There were occasions, not in public, she would reach for her slippers and learn the sprint of children. Sometimes it would be a quick open palmed slap across the shoulder.

As an 11 or 12-year-old child of people who had children young, you also realise sooner rather than later that your father – who played competitive sport and claimed to have hit the QRC tower with a six, five years before he got married - can still outrun you. I remember that one time the chase involved a leather belt.

The preferred punishment was Mom’s boofs or an assignment from Dad to count cars as they passed along the Eastern Main Road in St Augustine. If the sentence involved more than one child, the car tally had to be individually ratified or you were sent back to the gallery. Sometimes, a traitorous sister would refuse to cooperate, and the numbers would not square.

The point here is that the boof was what counted most in the Gibbings household. Now, if the sub-editor touches my use of “boof” I will not be happy. Even the experts agree that a final form remains unfinished business.

Lise Winer’s ‘Dictionary of the English/Creole of Trinidad & Tobago’, for example, offers four versions – buff, boof, bouf and bouffe. Its etymology is vast. I however prefer the use of “boof” which carries greatest onomatopoeic value and evades the threat of linguistic gentrification.

Use “bouf” or “bouffe” and the pronunciation would tend to be more reminiscent of the “Côte de Boeuf” at a fancy restaurant than the “boof” delivered by Aunt Harriet at the party.

In relatively well-adjusted families, boofs come before the licks, (if licks are at all to be administered). In some households, there are prompt, stinging, open-palm, fingertip slaps on the arm or shoulder or a “tap” at the back of the head.

There are others who prefer different chronologies. There would be the initial verbal admonition or guidance (“do NOT touch that”), the beg (“don’t do that nuh”), a boof (“what I tell you”), a withdrawal of benefits, an offer of reward, more boofs, and then licks like peas … in that order. Mind you, my son (who at 26 is a model citizen and ethical to a fault) was never subjected to corporal punishment at home.

Proposed speedier transitions usually come from those who consider themselves to be out of the line of fire (such as a big brother or sister) and who believe “bouffs/bouffes” are a soft sell before an audience of lesser mortals. “Lash dey (not my) tail!”

“I (whap) told (whap) you (whap) to (whaddap) take (whoop) the (whap) vaccine!!!”

If you think about it, this is the authoritarian SOE approach. This is despite early counsel that “an SOE cannot get you to wash your hands” – an admonition dismissed by “PR” hustlers and people clueless about some basic elements of behaviour change.

In fact, there has since been much boofing about the boofing. “You (boof) are (boof) NOT (boof) to boof!”

It is in the manner of paternalistic authoritarian cultures to skip the queue of moral suasion, and non-verbal and verbal “boofing” to head straight for the guava tree. (“Dey too harden. Cut dey tail”).

This is not to suggest that, eventually, licks are always an implausible option, but that a good example, appeals to reason, and boofs properly come first. Between the SOE (“you not getting to go to the party”) and the mandate (“messy room = no party”) there is likely to be much more begging and many boofs to come.

Stuck at 46% (my initial uneducated guess was 40%), the gap between suasion, begging, boofing, and outright licks is narrowing.

Some say the time has come. They might be right. The room is messy alright while, and yes, some feel we need to party.

Taking care of our things

One of my childhood friends was known for supreme diligence when attending to his belongings. It provided a basis for our bullying and teasing. He became something of a loner in later life. After all, which child puts away his toys after play? Who puts sweetie wrappers in the bin?

As a teen, he wore only crisp, clean clothing and was mercilessly jeered when one day he was witnessed ironing his underwear. By contrast, the rest of us wore unwashed jeans for months and months, until they stank and could basically stand on their own.

“Take care of your things, like David (not his real name),” my mother would tell the five of us.

For some strange reason, this childhood memory returned to me while I was being driven around the perimeter of the UWI Campus in St Augustine two weekends ago.

These days, I would typically be zooming past the area bemasked, dodging potholes, pedestrians, and distracted drivers. But on this day, en route to Macoya Market (where an ugly patch job at the entrance is not good enough), I was being driven by my wife. So, I had time to look around. It broke my heart to witness the condition of the campus buildings.

There were rusty, old galvanise sheets on one of the older buildings and moss and grime on the walls of the newer ones. Yes, the fields were mown, and the internal roadways seemed to be in relatively good shape. But the buildings appeared to have been neglected in their pandemic emptiness.

It occurred to me, during this outing, that the wider human condition in this COVID-19 era presents the requirement of taking better care of our things. My wife used the engineering term “built environment” when I stumbled with the distinction between all the “things” that needed care at this time.

If the pandemic has established one important life lesson, it is that the compartments we usually construct for human, natural and ‘built’ environments are a misguided illusion. Environmental scientists, for example, look critically at the dynamics at play when built infrastructure interacts with nature, and generate consequential impacts on the wellbeing of human populations. This is in fact the climate change story.

There is a concern, for instance, about the impact of built spaces on biological diversity and its implications for human wellness, both physical and mental. Leave a pothole long enough in the middle of the road and witness its impact on the quality of driving and other citizen behaviour.

In Aranguez, the taxi drivers are buying cement and fixing the potholes themselves. This brings more value to community life than the preservation of shocks and suspension systems. But it does not take the ministry of works off the hook. Its atrocious lethargy and neglect, in tandem with local government inaction and the recklessness of WASA, are among the more significant slurs on our humanity.

It should also bother us greatly that some communities are burning tyres on the road. This is not easily dismissible as mere partisan activism. Nobody really earns any points.

The wider metaphor of negligence is also encapsulated in the pandemic response. That political gain could have been envisaged in the promotion of COVID-denial, subversion of pandemic measures and now, vaccine hesitancy signals a willingness to engage in acts of reckless vandalism in the absence of a duty of care.

The reality is that we generally do not have the best record when it comes to taking care of our things. It’s expressed in our attitude toward “maintenance” of the built environment, but also in our predisposition when it comes to nature and to people.

For example, last week’s assault on pets and wild animals, the ill, and the elderly painted a worst-case scenario. It’s now a huge farce to hear of “zero tolerance” on the unlawful and reckless use of fireworks and “scratch-bombs.”

Here I have been decrying the defence of “tradition” and calling for a wholesale ban on everything from bamboo-busting to the use of “scratch-bombs” to the deployment of unregulated fireworks. All of these things – from care for our built environment to respect for other humans – are interrelated.

Today, we are faced with a pandemic which requires we proceed with care and caution. I am not seeing us, as a collective, doing very well on this score. True, the climate change conversation finds the world short on thoughtfulness. But we, in T&T, are simply not taking care of our things, including ourselves.

 

The climate survival game

If both the climate crisis and the pandemic have taught us one thing it is that we are mistaken if we believe, as Barbados PM Mia Mottley put it, that “national solutions can solve global problems.”

In other words, the best advice is to avoid self-delusion, after having conceded that there indeed exists an existential threat to our survival as a sovereign small island state. We cannot do this alone. A long view of history would speak of the decimation, through a variety of different circumstances, of grand empires occupying infinitely larger geographical spaces than ours.

Unfortunately, there are those who walk among us who don’t share such a belief. They emerge from the swamp of ignorance from time to time. This pandemic period is one example. But climate change scepticism is of more durable vintage and at the core is a lack of belief in science.

I have seen, for instance, social media challenges to the value of a T&T presence in Glasgow alongside key AOSIS and Small Island Developing States (SIDS) allies on the grounds of some kind of retreat from domestic reality.

Such doubt also exists in the pregnant silence of opinion-leaders fresh from campaigns of COVID denial, resistance to pandemic measures and tacit promotion of vaccine hesitancy. To them, climate change scepticism is not that remote a concept.

We would also do well to recognise unequal international status, whatever our grandiose self-assessment. The fact is, at the root of much of the discussions and negotiations in Glasgow today, are the disproportionate levels of victimisation involving the wealthy and powerful, as opposed to the small and the under-resourced.

These important differentials lie at the heart of some important but highly problematic instruments designed by the global community to mitigate further damage and deterioration in areas such as the Caribbean.

For example, access to climate financing is now linked, since the Paris Agreement of 2015, to nationally determined contributions (NDCs) to fighting climate change. Following a programme of serious work, an indicative version of this has been prepared by T&T and others for the current conference.

The G20 Leaders’ Summit in Rome ahead of Monday’s COP26 inaugural session however side-stepped key issues including a clear deadline for net zero carbon emissions, and basically agreed (having previously failed to do so) to raise US$100 billion to help fund mitigation efforts in countries such as ours. PM Mottley thinks this is far less than what is required or even possible.

The problem is continued delays in prompt action belie the fact that the processes of nature set in train, now undeniably through human activity, are already considered to be irreversible. The urgent goal of capping the rise in global temperatures to no more than 1.5% over current levels in order to “stay alive” is an increasingly unreachable target.

The existence of an Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) however indicates acceptance of the fact that we cannot do this on our own, and that there are fellow travellers in whom there exist key commonalities.

As co-author of a Caribbean journalism handbook on “the climate crisis”, I have also been warned of the “alarmist” impact of employment of the word “crisis.” Well, dear friends, if climate change does not constitute an unfolding crisis for countries that are small, surrounded by the ocean, and still engaged in finding feet of their own in the development process, then what is?

T&T/Jamaica scientist Dr Rebekah Shirley has offered a menu of subjects for consideration by the AOSIS community. On the front burner, she proposes, ought to be political efforts to prioritise negotiations on adaptation, loss, and damage; commitments for blended forms of adaptation finance; and consensus on a carbon market mechanism.

Countries such as ours also have a vested interest in moving the developed world from elaborately expressed commitment to action. However, there were mixed reviews out of Rome regarding the prospects for realisation of such goals. This made the working sessions in Glasgow far more worthy of attention than the impressive speeches.

My friend and ACM science advisor, Steve Maximay, often advises against deployment of the “we go dead” approach. But the science may well conclude that as small island states faltering in our aspirations for true sovereignty, extinction is actually not a figuratively remote scenario.

Resilience, the pandemic, and climate change

(Published in the T&T Guardian on October 6, 2021)

By now, just two days later, many of us would have already succumbed to some degree of budget fatigue.

It has occurred to me that budget processes in parliament, media and other public spaces have become so predictable and routinised politically, that some news stories are capable of being assembled in advance, barring precise figures and measures.

 

The issues that attract the most attention often remain the stuff of sterile annual ritual.

 

The event however has the potential to guide attention and awareness to broader developmental challenges and goals that ought to properly engage the microeconomics, but often doesn’t.

 

Take, for example, the perils of climate change (the “climate crisis” being a better formulation). Comb the budget presentation for specific mention. True, there is. In bits and scattered pieces - shorelines, carbon capture and electric cars. But there’s a bigger story.

 

It’s also there in the implementation, but only in implicit increments of preventative measures and remedies – shorelines to safeguard, watercourses to excavate, proper infrastructure planning to engage, livelihoods to protect, and adaptive measures to minimise natural and social harm from changing climatological conditions.

 

In less than a month from now, we will be asked to parade these otherwise muted elements of our development before the world at the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, also known as COP26, in Glasgow, Scotland.

 

It is conceivable that the budget statement could have been presented against the backdrop of more than one urgent context to include the climate crisis. For, even when the pandemic challenge is mostly over (though I think the virus will be with us in some form for many years to come) there will remain questions of viability linked to climate change.

 

At COP26, for instance, we will be expected to draw attention to this country’s Carbon Reduction Strategy. Such a strategy identifies core actions linked to what is prescribed under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) as our (intended) Nationally Determined Contribution (iNDC) to global carbon targets.

 

There is a lot more to this but, in short, our intention as a country is to reduce emissions from power generation, transportation, and industry by up to 15% by 2030. It is expected that the net cost of this would be in the order of US$2 billion. None of this was heard on Monday. Let’s listen on Friday and in the days that follow.

 

People currently arguing over Mr Imbert’s budget measures should pay attention to this, if only to appreciate the processes being engaged and to assess the prospects for achieving such targets, given the financing needs and the channels through which international funding is accessible.

 

Monday was also significant for us because even as the finance minister was attempting to reassure us that financial ruin is not yet upon the nation, the UN Secretary-General was a half hour flight away from here, in Barbados, addressing the opening of the 15^th United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in rather dim tones.

 

It was well worth lending the event an eye and ears as world governments mulled prospects for achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals in tandem with the climate change agenda by 2030.

 

The pandemic has provided a massive barrier to realisation of most of this, especially in the case of poor and middle-income countries. Small island developing states such as T&T ought to be paying much closer attention to such a state of affairs despite relative economic strength in our case.

 

The Caribbean region, as a whole, is pretty much broke. It is a reality we in T&T ignore at our peril – as with the collapse of Venezuela.

 

If the Barbados UNCTAD is significant for one purpose, it would be that it merges the multiplicity of challenges into a single prognosis spanning a spectrum of hope and hopelessness.

 

The asymmetrical impacts of the pandemic, for example, concur alongside varying regional abilities and disabilities, including our collective capacity to prevail in the face of the climate crisis.

 

The national budget, climate and our pandemic conditions are absolutely linked. The long view requires steps toward resilience that span the pandemic and beyond.

 

Life Sentences

Though I “passed” for QRC as a student of Curepe Presbyterian, I spent almost all my primary school life at Caroni Presbyterian – a small, U-shaped, red-brick structure in the middle of a lush canefield.

I grew up near UWI in St Augustine with a misty morning view of Mt St Benedict. But it was the grazing bison of Caroni, the sharp green leaves of the sugarcane and razor-grass, and the clackety-clack of the cane train that remain among my most enduring primary school memories.

True, one day I saw a donkey being mercilessly beaten as it reluctantly drew a cart full of grass or sugarcane. Five and a half decades later, I still hear the crack of that whip on thick, defenceless hide.

My grandfather, as Caroni headmaster, would deliver assembly speeches that spoke of man’s inhumanity to man, justice, equality, and the responsibilities of independence.

“The test of a man is the fight that he makes,/The grit that he daily shows,/The way he stands upon his feet,/And takes life’s numerous bumps and blows.” There I was at Queen’s Hall – hair shiny and gripping my scalp, powder on my face and chest, clothes crisp and clean, onstage, hands clasped, making Grandpa proud.

Contrastingly, the Curepe experience became quickly queued for exit from memory. There is some fogginess surrounding those few months. A sadistic teacher who threw a duster at a student. A girl who fell on her way upstairs and busted her lip. And Jean Jacques who overturned a desk and cussed the duster-throwing teacher.

But it was there I sat the Common Entrance Examination and “passed” for QRC. A relative of mine had sat and “failed” two years before.

Was it possible that the “bright boy” from Caroni would follow? I didn’t. But there were those who had “failed” and subsequently disappeared, unlike my relative who went on to become a quite accomplished professional.

There were many tales to be told of the cruelty of Common Entrance at that time. How come Angela “failed”? And Rajin and Egbert? Whatever happened to them? What were their life sentences?

At QRC we were trained to forget all that. On the first day, our form teacher said the secondary school experience was about learning and applying knowledge and was not about examinations and passing.

This was, I presumed, a perverse form of therapy to help us forget those who had gone from view, and the depravities we had witnessed.

We were left wondering what accounted for this leap from cruelty to what appeared to have been a new reality. Of course, it was all a lie. GCE turned out to be just as frantic and despairing. But that’s another story. I will someday come to that.

Then, many years later, came the grand transition from the Common Entrance to SEA – a process presumably guided by work that blended data, enlightened, learned contemplation, and political will. It was all there in the press releases!

However, there were serious educationists who remained silently sceptical and others who wrote about virtual sleight of hand. Children, you see, were still effectively “passing” or “failing” or being forgotten.

Social psychologist, Prof. Ramesh Deosaran has written about the “humanitarian violation” resulting from the combined effects of the SEA and the presence of “Concordat-governed schools.”

I also have a copy of educationist Prof. Jerome De Lisle’s paper on Secondary School Examinations in the Caribbean. In it, he surmises that the current system “ignores the measurement limitations of high-stakes achievement tests, the threat of unintended consequences, and the inequalities in opportunities to learn that persist throughout the system.”

In essence, these two experts are rendering bare what some of us untrained observers have long suspected. That though the donkey carts have gone away, and the dusters unlikely to be released with force at students, there is an underlying cruelty that persists together with verdicts that span a long time – life sentences.

Latterly, those who note the move in Barbados to abolish the Common Entrance are these days barely recognising the differences SEA ostensibly produced. They do so even as they call for its corresponding withdrawal here.

The important differences between the two systems to combat the fallibility of “test-based early selection”, as De Lisle once noted, have apparently not relieved the pain they were meant to ameliorate.

This is among the things these new times cannot fail to address. I am not hearing much from all concerned to engender the required confidence.

 

Natural Caribbean Unity and Haiti

Entering the Haitian discourse at this time is fraught with perils of all kinds. For starters, the subject is emotionally and ideologically linked to the country’s cruel treatment at the hands of unconscionable colonials and is underlined by a recurring suggestion of geo-political victimhood.

Everywhere last week, for instance, David Rudder’s poetic commentary on a misunderstanding involving a Haitian taxi driver in New York was sounded as a predictable anthem on the theme of perpetual nightmare.

Now, be clear, there are competent observers who have never set foot in the country but are able to capture the gist of a situation in which heavy odds are stacked even against the most noble aspirations. But being there (as I have, more than once) can fill important gaps in understanding flavours not readily available in the videos or texts.

Even more, institutionalising a relationship rooted in history and ethnic solidarity – as has been the case between Haiti and Caricom since 2002 - takes you closer to an understanding of dynamics not otherwise readily accessible.

For, even as the late CLR James was able to match the revolution-to-revolution advances in Haiti, France, and Russia in The Black Jacobins, he was unable, in a 1958 speech in Guyana – to easily attach “natural unity” to relations between Haiti and some parts of the Commonwealth Caribbean.

The awkwardness had also been on display before and after 2002. Not only in the form of linguistic inconvenience – except for the Saint Lucians and Dominicans – but through the practicalities of public service culture and the persistence of political unreliability and dysfunctionality.

I recall the Port-au-Prince discussions of 1994, upon the return of deposed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, when our offer of (British) colonial public service assistance was extended to his bureaucrats, and their polite (but never seriously pursued) response.

It has since not been an easy ride. There are people in senior diplomatic Caribbean circles who agree that Haitian membership of Caricom was far more the stuff of irrational ideological fantasy than pragmatic self-preserving diplomacy.

Such emotions were roused last December when the OAS Permanent Council permitted Venezuelan participation, despite the country’s withdrawal from the body in 2017. Its “representative” went on to defame the people and government of T&T over the drowning of 16 Venezuelans (in Venezuelan waters) in an incident that November. Haiti, Jamaica, and The Bahamas were not among the Caricom countries to firmly resist an associated resolution.

Our country is yet to fully recover from the diplomatic slur, despite continuing public protestations by Caribbean diplomats. This quite recently earned ambassador Ronald Sanders of Antigua and Barbuda the public derision and disrespect of his Haitian OAS counterpart.

Now, this is not to suggest that Haiti’s current crisis is any less our business, as has been suggested (even through silence) on some fronts. It is in fact a situation in which Caricom, almost exclusively, has the potential to bear the torch of honest broker.

T&T’s declining regional leadership over the past ten of so years can, in fact, be retrieved through enlightened engagement of the Haiti challenge within Caricom.

The political vacuum created by Moïse’s assassination – together with all the associated issues surrounding the legitimacy of his tenure and subsequent appointments - calls for supple diplomatic hands. The events predating the assassination of Haitian President Jean Vilbrun Guillaume Sam in 1915, and those that followed, should not be forgotten. The ensuing US occupation of Haiti did not end until 1934.

This is not to fuel any conspiracy theory regarding what happened at the Moïse household on July 7. There are numerous suspicions. Yet, Caricom, as an interested party, has a unique role to play in facilitating a climate of reconciliation both within and without Haiti. The regional body cannot be left out of the equation, whatever the current internecine discomforts.

As part of the regional grouping, Haiti can no longer be described as a mere neighbour since it occupies important, if not uncomfortable, space in our house. But it would help us all to recognise our limitations as well as the quality of the familial arrangements.

We must also know that all of this is not going to be as simple as saying we’re all sorry.

 

Among the ranks of the forgotten

Much to my chagrin, nobody accused me of jumping the queue when COVID-19 vaccine doses were first offered to “the elderly” at the end of March as the first modest COVAX shipment arrived.

What ever happened to “you does look good for your age” and all that? True, I had myself listened attentively for a precise definition of the designation (“the elderly”) when it was clear that anticipated slow vaccine supplies would invariably require an age/health condition hierarchy for administering such protection.

I had already been through the National Insurance drill which sets parameters involving two milestones – (i) reaching 60 and (ii) realising that you are 65 and should not be working so hard.

No, I am not yet at phase two, thank you. I, in fact, made it to phase one three years ago

But youthful myopia – both as private individuals and as states - has you feeling your time never comes.

There is a parallel with an exchange I had with a politically appointed senior energy advisor some years ago who advised that T&T should not worry about oil and gas reserves “running out.”

“As long as the planet remains viable, we will have oil,” he said.

Then, you reach 60, and the TTARP card you got at 50 is no longer a social media joke and you have worked overseas, and freelanced, and people had your NIS number all mixed up and you realise you are pretty much among those “Scottie” James O’Neil Lewis described as the officially “forgotten”.

“One gets the impression,” the late diplomat told me 21 year ago, “there is a feeling that people are living too long.”

Relatedly, it was my father, many years before this, explaining to me exactly what a late friend of his did professionally as an “actuary”.

As an insurance man, Dad expressed much of this in measures of financial risk. Among the things he told me was that his friend had more than once expressed concern about the eventual “bunching” of both private and state benefits to the elderly.

Sooner or later, he surmised, the country’s ability to sustain largely non and partially contributory support for those who had reached the final phases of their lives would be depleted, especially within the context of a country where there is a widening gap between the young and an increasing number of old people who are tending to live longer and longer.

Such a revelation more than 40 years ago came to mind when I read Raphael John-Lall’s Sunday Guardian interview with gerontologist, Dr Jennifer Rouse.

“The last cohort of the “baby boomer” generation, those born between 1946 and 1964, are due to retire in 2024, followed closely by the Generation X-ers, a significant number of who are contract workers,” the article says.

To locate specific political responsibility for such an oversight is particularly problematic. Current protestations over the inevitability of extending the retirement age to 65, for purposes of NIS benefits, ought not to include a partisan flavour if people are inclined to be honest. Nobody seemed to seriously note what had been happening – multiple studies and seminars later.

An IPS feature published in my name in 1999 points to the fact that 21 years ago there had been concern by people such as Rouse and others that by the year 2005, people over the age of 60 would have accounted for 20 percent of the population – a situation that will eventually bring into jeopardy the ability of the state system to continue payment of benefits, at set levels, to the aged.

Today’s actual statistic for the elderly is closer to 15 percent, but it persists at a time when the stresses of the pandemic period are accentuating the impact of seriously compromised macro-economic conditions, and the fact of an ageing population.

The options remain limited. I can’t see how we can escape an effort to protect the integrity of national insurance as a reliable source of support to the aged. The real issue, though, would be to assure us that “we” won’t be consigned to the ranks of the forgotten.

There is evidence that a measure of forgetting occurs. There are even those who believe some culling during this crisis might well be a blessing in disguise. The words of Dr O’Neil Lewis bear repeating: “There is a feeling that people are living too long.” Are we?

 

The agony of labour

In case you hadn’t noticed, it was Labour Day last Saturday. A stark Rishi Ragoonath photograph on page 7 of the Sunday Guardian virtually told the entire June 19 story – but mainly, and perhaps only, to those who have walked the Fyzabad trail.

As a 1980s labour reporter I made the walk several times. When I looked around then, it was hard to tell the difference between the journalists covering the annual event and the trade union members celebrating it – except we did not typically join in the singing, or bear placards.

I believe we all knew at the time that our marching with the celebrants represented much more than “coverage”, even though our demeanour would change, and our press passes become more openly displayed once we reached the bandstand and the speeches we could have reported on, even before hearing them.

Even so, we were realising that more than 40 years following the advent of modern trade unionism in T&T, the broad developmental role of the labour movement had begun to change. Oil and gas wealth was transforming the land and peoplescape. The politics had evolved. A new status quo had begun to take effect, within which unions held a fixed spot.

Political parties with any kind of popular support were moving further and further away from the interests of organised labour - save for the 1975/1976 version of the ULF. Neither the PNM nor the UNC can lay claim to sleepless nights over such matters.

Since those days, union membership has also shrunk to the extent that, today, under 20 percent of the working population is represented by a labour union – some of them undemocratic and dysfunctional.  

This has rendered a notion of tripartism marginal to essential questions of the social and economic well-being of the country. Had this been otherwise, the withdrawal of the three (yes, three) trade union federations from the National Tripartite Advisory Council would have had a far more seismic impact on today’s state of pandemic affairs.

Instead, nobody recognises any real change in the dynamics of public discourse or action.

Economist Vanus James was even moved to declare on the weekend that the interests of workers are now more appropriately placed in the hands of employers that are, in turn, reliant on state support for a more vibrant business environment.

“The mechanisms you need to support workers (are) through their jobs in the private sector,” he is quoted as saying.

Even so, Dr James acknowledged the value of both SMEs and the medium to large enterprise sectors. He however did not remind us (though he knows) that the state, in all its manifestations, is the single largest employer in the country, and that the informal sector will continue to grow, especially under current conditions, as a largely unrepresented employment cohort.

So, where do trade unions enter the picture? They represent a small and declining minority of workers. Their interests are not clearly aligned to the unrepresented majority. There is also no coherent, joint developmental agenda in the face of a pandemic that has severely reduced private and public financial resources, and led to a loss of jobs and economic opportunity.

Yet, enlightened trade unions can be among the most valuable assets in protecting the interests of workers wherever they are found by helping to define the terms of engagement involving a dominant state, a self-centred private sector, and the population.

Very little about this is included in the reporting of the Post-COVID Roadmap to Recovery. Not much more from anyone else has also portrayed a future in which commerce, industry, and finance can sustain and enrich us all through productive engagement of the country’s most important resource.

There are, in fact, no “good old days” of trade unionism to which there should be a return. What we have are different times that are serving to re-focus a lethargic, complacent, and arguably incapable labour movement.

A new social compact is clearly insufficient to our needs if we do not move forward from tripartism to a new multipartism more closely aligned to current realities.

Under such conditions, trade unions may find more relevant space. If they are concerned. If they are willing. If they are able. The agony of labour confronts us all.

 

Caricom’s next steps

June 9, 2021 

Wesley Gibbings

On August 15, Belizean diplomat, economist, and former politician, Dr Carla Barnett, will take over at the Caricom Secretariat in Georgetown at a time when a combination of all three skillsets of hers, and more, will be required to navigate the integration movement safely through the most perilous period in its 48-year history.

If the pandemic challenge has proven one thing, it is that the brittle post-colonial substructures of the movement require extensive excavation and refurbishment.

This goes beyond the discrete institutional pillars of economic integration, human and social development, foreign policy coordination, and security. For, in the end, all of these would need to be fundamentally repurposed.

They have certainly proven to be near useless in this crisis, not in the direct sense of a role in regional public health coordination through CARPHA, for instance, (though there is a lot to be said here) but as cohesive mechanisms to manage the general well-being of the region at a time of urgent need.

It took 28 years to revise the 1973 Treaty of Chaguaramas. Further changes are needed 20 years later. Among the first tasks would be to reformulate its architecture and to decide who is coming along for the rest of this long ride.

Jamaica has already determined an exit route. The Bahamas has persistently kept at least one foot outside. And Haiti has not always displayed good neighbourliness - whatever our own negligence toward a country whose chaotic entry into the fraternity has never been reconciled.

These three come to mind particularly in the aftermath of last November’s OAS vote on Venezuela when T&T fell victim to a disrespectful, cynical lie. This is hard to forget or to forgive. I have mentioned other disappointments in past columns. This one though …

Meanwhile, the Caricom “travel bubble” popped early because the promise of a greater protective/nurturing mechanism for social, economic, political, and cultural resilience had already ruptured in our faces.

At each turn, it has mostly been everybody for themselves, rendering invalid the prospects for meaningful, joint action in the application of health and travel protocols, the coordinated acquisition of vaccines, and a single, resilient face and voice before the world.

It has also been impossible to tidily compartmentalise even the most specialised functions of the state in addressing a crisis that is taking lives and leaving growing numbers in despair, pain of all varieties, and facing death. How is COVID-19 not as much a regional security question as it is a public health challenge?

In T&T, for instance, we are learning too slowly yet surely that the pandemic is not solely a matter for a ministry of health.

Against such a backdrop, Dr Barnett, together with interested regional leaders, would do well to dispassionately assess all regional options for survival. However, engaging the massive tasks will require institutional assets the Caricom bureaucratic establishment and its associated institutions do not currently possess or are able to harness.

For example, the Caricom Secretariat is not a modern organisation within the meaning of 21^st century institutions of its kind. If Dr Barnett does not understand this, she will go nowhere with any of the aspirations she has already found the time to identify.

By August 15, people in all member states should know her well. It is not in the stock of the professional instincts of public servants to pursue such an objective. Her predecessor proved the point.

But Dr Barnett has fought elections, sat in the senate of Belize, and traded punches with the best during assignments spanning different political administrations. Media shyness will thus not be treated with magnanimity.

She is also a former deputy Secretary-General of Caricom who knows the ins and outs of the Georgetown arrangements.

There is much work to be done. Caricom’s “open regionalism” as a way of engaging the rest of the world is up for frank review. Existing institutions need to be evaluated and rationalised.

There are those out there foolish enough to believe that any of us can set sail on our own or cleave to perceived opportunities not borne out of our own realities. There are others who believe we can make a future for ourselves and generations to come, right here. Dr Barnett has, as part of her unwritten terms of reference, the task of steering countries and people in such a direction.

Rebuilding Competitiveness in Trinidad and Tobago (Guest Contribution)

Dr Terrence Farrell

Economist/Former Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of T&T

The Covid-19 pandemic will cause the demise of some businesses, especially in tourism, hospitality, and personal services.  Other businesses, notably traditional media (newspapers and television) and mobile telephone companies have been under severe pressure for some time due to technological change.  Guardian Media and OCM have seen profitability plunge.  TSTT and Digicel have had to lay off staff.  

These pandemic and technology-related effects apart, this country is witnessing what economists term ‘deindustrialization’, that is where there is more or less rapid attrition of firms in an industry due to loss of competitiveness.  Indeed, deindustrialization is a symptom of loss of competitiveness, whether in manufacturing, agriculture, or in the services sector.

While industrial development is achieved over time periods usually measured in decades, deindustrialization can unfold more quickly depending on how fast competitiveness is eroded and how fast firms recognize and respond to the loss of competitiveness.  Our national competitiveness has been eroding.  The Sugar industry became more uncompetitive into the 1970s and was kept on life support through subsidies for over 30 years after that.  In Manufacturing, it has been eroding anew over the last fifteen years or so.  In the Energy sector, as the era of cheap gas locally has ended, the loss of competitiveness has been of more recent vintage since the shale revolution in the USA.

What is happening now was presaged in the 1970s and early 1980s by the closure of several firms whose competitiveness had been built on import substitution behind protective quotas (Negative List) and tariffs.  Those firms failed to attain sufficient scale in regional or extra-regional markets, and either went out of business (e.g., Neal and Massy’s car assembly plant and the textile manufacturers), decamped elsewhere to get scale economies (e.g., Johnson and Johnson), or eliminated uneconomic product lines (e.g., Nestle and Unilever).  Some manufacturing firms in the Food and Beverage industry were able to survive and grow because they achieved strong market positions in local and regional markets.  

These include Bermudez (biscuits), S M Jaleel (soft drinks), and Associated Brands (chocolates and cereals).  These firms, as well as others with strong local demand, like Carib Breweries and Angostura in alcoholic beverages, and Langston Roach Industries in household cleaning products, benefited from the exchange rate adjustments in 1987 and again in 1993 which improved price competitiveness.  As economic growth and profitability improved in the 1990s, our financial institutions in banking and insurance began their expansion into regional markets, notably, CLICO, Guardian Holdings, Republic Bank, and First Citizens Bank.

We had a long period of improved competitiveness from the early 1990s.  However, we are now into another cycle of deindustrialization similar to the 1970s and early 1980s.  Employment in Manufacturing peaked in 2004 and has declined steadily since.  In Iron and Steel, Arcelor-Mittal departed overnight.  As cheap gas has disappeared, the older, less efficient ammonia plants have been forced to close.   Methanol and ammonia companies are shifting strategically to position their plants here as swing producers and are making any new investments in plants elsewhere where gas prices are lower, and end-markets are closer.  Unilever is basically halting manufacturing here and will become just a distributor.  Nestle’s manufacturing production has been scaled back significantly.  

Our locally-owned Food and Beverage manufacturers have also been making their new investments elsewhere, in Costa Rica (Bermudez), Jamaica (S M Jaleel and Bermudez) and Colombia (Associated Brands).  In financial services, the Canadian banks, Scotia, CIBC, and Royal, have been disinvesting or reshaping their business models as higher regulatory and compliance costs in these small markets with overvalued exchange rates and weak economies are making their businesses less competitive.

Is it possible to revive competitive industries, and how do we do so, beyond public relations visits to factories and pleas for ‘ease of doing business’?  The answer today is more complex than it was in the 1980s because competitiveness is determined by a combination of factors including price, location, technology, logistics, product uniqueness, and the ability to exploit networks in order to access markets.  Price and scale remain critically important and cannot be ignored, even where other factors may, in specific instances, mitigate their effects.  

Firms must learn to innovate, to create unique selling propositions, and to build potentially global brands. However small, they should have the ‘DNA of an elephant’.  Some must learn how to use platforms such as Amazon, Mercadolibre, or Alibaba to penetrate new markets.  They must be allowed, nay encouraged, to invest overseas, regionally, and extra-regionally.

We don’t need all of InvesTT, TTIFC, ETeck, Free Zones Company and ExporTT.   Tasked with implementing some form of the ‘Triple Helix’ belaboured unceasingly by Mary King, one properly resourced government agency must help firms access research and development resources, obtain funding for innovation, collaborate with universities, exploit diasporic and diplomatic networks, and navigate access to developed country markets in the face of what Paschal Lamy has termed their newer ‘precautionary’ barriers around product safety for consumers and environmental protection.

Deindustrialization flows from Dutch Disease and weak, reactive policy making, which combine to erode competitiveness.  Anesthetized by energy sector rents and government subsidies, we may hardly perceive what is unfolding around us.  But if we are to halt and reverse it, we must appreciate what it will take to rebuild competitiveness, and the risks and costs involved.  We need to be single-minded, not superficial, focused, not fickle.  We have a lot of work to do.

The lessons of history

April 14, 2021

Wesley Gibbings

Two months from now, with the advent of the annual hurricane season, the Caribbean region will come face to face with yet another challenge to its resolve to persist as a viable, sovereign geographical space.

We have latterly added to chronic socio-political dysfunctionality, extreme weather events, earthquakes and volcanoes, the unfolding reality of the climate crisis and now, another pandemic.

We’ve been down all these roads before. It is in the natural course of history that nations are tested from time to time to the limits of their endurance. In most instances they prevail. In others they collapse and disappear – if not from internecine disquiet, from the weight of exogenous destructive and predatory forces.

I have more than once attracted considerable vitriol for suggesting that a long review of history witnesses the disappearance of civilisations far greater than ours, and that there is no objective reason why we should be any less vulnerable or more privileged, particularly as small island states.

Following a public lecture on the future of Caribbean media at the Montego Bay Campus of UWI almost exactly five years ago, an angry university student from an OECS nation walked up to me with a telling-off.

I had wondered aloud during my presentation how, given small space and woefully finite natural resources, his country continued to exist as a sovereign state attempting to make it into the future alone – even frequently denying the value of an integrated regional space.

Then, more recently, one T&T journalist was inclined to reference the “tiny island” state of St Vincent and the Grenadines – blissfully unmindful of the context of our own small size and vulnerabilities. I suppose this means we are a “big” island. Steups.

Here we go again, I told one colleague, the “small island” talk that occupies permanent, obsessive space in the minds of ethno-centric commentators, some of whom have emerged in recent days regurgitating the political myth of imported votes 65 years ago.

Meanwhile, not far from our own small island state, the Mayans once thrived throughout the Yucatán Peninsula. When the pandemic storm ends, travel and see for yourself what remains of their legacy. There are other examples. Look them up. Pre-Columbian Tainos. Indus civilisation. The Khmer Empire.

I have also visited the Pacific region more than once. You can look down from your aircraft and see the disappearing atolls. In Tebunginako, Kiribati, the village church stands in the ocean when the tide comes in. Tuvalu - with a vote equal to ours, the United States, Russia, and China individually – is known as a disappearing island.

I have noted to the consternation of many that, in some instances, the continued existence of some of our regional constituents as states flying independence flags challenges several historical norms – whatever the state of self-delusion. That many of our economies defy the meaning of the texts.

Venezuela once thrived as a modern metropolis next door. We visited frequently for tourism, shopping, and the camaraderie of neighbours. Today, it stands testimony to the ravages of political depravity.

There is very little to suggest our own immunity. The quality of the current responses to adjoining tragedies do little to engender optimism that a wholesome approach by all elements is adopted to prepare for challenges beyond immediate pandemic and economic woes.

Desperate Venezuelans fleeing political and economic disaster are “de Venes”. The government is advised “not to bring the Vinceys here.” There were convulsions when Dominicans were invited to rest their weary heads here following Hurricane Maria in 2019. I shall not be apologetic about insisting that all of this has emerged mainly from the same quarters.

Such is the work of vandals, unmindful of our own susceptibilities and many with one foot planted outside home terrain, who applaud each pandemic misstep and have led the way with everything from early COVID denial to current vaccination hesitancy.  

None of this suggests meek compliance with authority or silence on breaches of rights, proper political behaviour, or plain common sense.

But what we have been witnessing reeks of a sense of invulnerability and privilege. Two weeks ago, someone was declaring the demise of Caricom. Today, an empathetic regional response can make the difference between life and death. Just saying.