Pandemic pains and pan
December 30, 2020
Wesley
Gibbings
There are
echoes that haunt panyards. You won’t know about this unless you have entered
one and stood behind a pan. So, do not call the police if you see me passing such
premises slowly in my car, windows down, one hand cupping an ear as if to
capture the failing strap of a loose face mask.
After
almost 40 unbroken years of Panorama competitions, pan performances and pan
talk, I heard the echo last year as I took my place (“like Boogsie”, I told everybody)
behind Birdsong-branded double seconds and between the instructions of the
incomparable Derrianne Dyett, and the discordant jumble of other beginners.
Who could
have told then what the future had in store for all of us?
The year
2020 came to test pan, both as a musical instrument and as an agent of social
cohesion and change, in ways not previously experienced or envisaged. Even in
its manifestation as the best thing we do, tougher challenges would have been
extremely hard to find.
A
determined pandemic barely missed Panorama 2020, but its careful management has
ensured that in 2021, the practice of pan will comprise invention and ingenuity
– qualities that have given the instrument its true value both as creative
platform and as largely unrealised economic prospect.
We too
often do not recognise that the world’s best pan manufacturers, players,
tuners, arrangers, and innovators reside right here among us – riding the maxi
taxis, teaching in our schools, administering medication in our hospitals,
advocating in court, generally contributing to public life as regular citizens
but also working and earning from the practice of pan.
True, there
are those who resent its egalitarianism and some who assign to it narrow ethnic
cleavages. But there is no doubt that the steelpan is the most widely played
musical instrument in T&T and is a gift we have given to the world.
Its
pervasive presence also stands in sturdy defiance of VS Naipaul’s once wildly
uninformed claim that our story as a people is problematic since “history is
built around achievement and creation (and) nothing was created in the West
Indies.”
It could
not have been that the famed author had not at some enlightened moment in his
youth deduced that in the underdeveloped tinny sounds that often broke the
Woodbrook silence, resided a story of the conquest of adversity and the triumph
of joy.
It is not
that we have always got things right. The annual Panorama competition has at
different times been described as the best and the worst thing to happen to
pan. Both sides are worth a careful listen, especially now that prohibitions that
will persist well into the New Year, offering a challenge some have already conceded.
As Peter
Ray Blood reminded some of us a few days ago, “by now, the stage and North
Stand, and South Quay Stand would have been built. This time last year Panorama
had already started. I have a tabanca.”
Even so, the
search for pan in the pandemic has not been an altogether onerous exercise. On
Christmas Day, Desperadoes brought us a high-quality programme, and Starlift
presented its Virtual Concert. Players/arrangers such as Duvone Stewart, Leon
“Smooth” Edwards, Len “Boogsie” Sharpe and others have kept things flowing over
these coronavirus months.
The virtual
world has also highlighted the likes of younger Turks such as Zahra Mawusi Lake
of Antigua, Andre White in the US, and Aviel Scanterbury of T&T. We have
been able to listen to Dane Gulston and Mikhail Salcedo, among the more
seasoned.
The point I
am making is that the practice of pan has neither been paused nor brought to a
halt because of the pandemic. But it has certainly changed and will continue to
change.
This year,
we also said thank you and farewell to Hugh Borde, Neville Jules, Hanny Leon,
“Tash” Ash, Nervin “Teach” Saunders, Denzil “Dimes” Fernandez, Jomo Wahtuse,
Clifford “Rope” Alfred, Karen Codrington, and Milton “Wire” Austin.
‘When Steel
Talks’ has listed all of these and more (www.panonthenet.com). We need to find
the occasion to share special thoughts about all of them. There aren’t enough
words here to express what needs to be said. There’s all of 2021 to do so.
Their names are in the echoes we hear.
Three little boys on the ocean
December 2, 2020
Wesley Gibbings
There are some subjects best left to the poets and dramatists and musicians and visual artists whose deft touch can straddle emotion and the rigours of reason at the stroke of a single moment or line. Issues well out of the reach of the disciplines of law, politics and journalism. Equations that defy the arithmetic of known logic and the dicta of organised religion.
Since the events of last week, I have therefore been turning to Victor Edwards’ Takdir on the question of migrant journeys. To Wayne Brown on matters of the troubled ocean. And to Pablo Neruda on love and the sea.
To Victor I present the makings of a script that echoes Gurusammi’s fateful voyage. To Wayne, a child of the sea. To Pablo, the troubled strait that took its name from a genocidal European explorer.
For Victor I offer as opening scene three little boys set sail on the ocean – Aylan (3), Felipe (8) and let’s call the other one Hugo or Pablito.
Pablito, the landlubbing seafarer. We don’t know his age, but he wore a Spiderman t-shirt in the newspaper. We couldn’t see his face because he kept staring at the tears that reached the wet ground when he landed.
Sternward, in the growing and increasingly dark distance, can be seen the ruinous flames of a collective death – Joshua’s fabled Hazor, to those who this season sing of Baby Jesus and claim to know why.
To the bow, the tentative promise of life. Aylan’s parents raised $5,860 for the trip. His mother wears a life vest later found to be “ineffective.” She dreams not of shopping malls and romantic rendezvous with strangers speaking strange languages but yearns for peace and safety.
Little Aylan wears a red t-shirt and dark blue shorts. New suede shoes for the journey to a new life. His mother sings him lullabies through the stormy night.
Felipe has not stopped coughing since they left the soggy, wooded makeshift port. He has had the flu. He’d earlier been separated from his parents for “processing” and now he is running a high fever and shivers each time the rain comes down on the open vessel.
Then there’s Hugo. He’s hard to miss as the boat sways wildly in the wind and rain and Mr Spiderman casts imaginary webs to tame the wild ocean.
You put them all on an open pirogue under an angry sky, at which point all that went before and all that happens after pale into insignificance as counterbalances on perspective. Three little boys on a boat in the ocean.
You wonder if in freezing the moment and stripping it of context you reach the core, the raw elements of what adults describe as “rights.” At the very moment that the giant wave arrives there is little behind both horizons, since though there is a relativism attached to many rights, there is an absolutism that flows from all – the “fundamental” cast in law versus the universality and indivisibility of human rights.
The experts make the distinction far less clearly than the water colourist at her palette. Suddenly, “how dem reach there?” and “who put dem there?” become as irrelevant as the burning shore to the west and the three cloudy peaks to the east.
There is no “other take”. No “perspective” apart from the fact of three little boys on a boat on the ocean. Nicolás, in thick rubber boats had kicked the boat from its moorings and turned away while muttering insults at people who weren’t there.
On the other shore, faceless, leaderless “authorities”, regular folks, and friends of the sea shouting cusswords and waiting with steel-tips to kick the vessel back. No more room at the inn. No more space for any boarders. “Send dem back. Send dem back” – as elections slogan. As potent as the command to a firing-squad. As murderous as official confusion and cluelessness.
Anna Levi writes: “Pablito like an ornament in his birth blanket/Asleep with his angels/Fallen overboard/Tumbling with the tides/A moment of silence.”
Sometimes, you turn to poetry and music and art to explain and to help turn away from depravity. Sometimes, you think of three little boys on the ocean. And, suddenly, they are gone and there is nothing and no one else in the world.
Footnote: In memory of Aylan Kurdi of Syria and Felipe Gómez Alonzo of Guatemala. Thinking of “Pablito” of Venezuela.
Language, class and status in the pandemic
Peshenwengweng
and the zessers
Novenber 25, 2020
Wesley
Gibbings
Contemporary
pop culture is particularly unmerciful on those who blink slowly. In no time at
all, the word “jackass” becomes a verb and “peshenwengweng” enters as onomatopoeic
depiction of the sound bullets make - having up to that point missed their intended
or collateral targets.
The use of “Gen
C” (“C” being the coronavirus) to refer to children born after January 1 this
year is also already picking up steam online and “LOLsob” is now shorthand for an
experience that can make you laugh (out loud) and cry at the same time.
Some of us
have become chronic LOLsobbers and may require medication, I must confess. It
is a condition which accompanies the feeling that if you don’t laugh about something
you would be inclined to cry.
I was even
seeing where there is a word to describe that moment after having placed an
Amazon order, you remember something else you needed to buy. It’s called “Amazheimer’s.”
By now, we also know who is a “maskhole”. Saw lots of them at Curepe Junction
last weekend, walking down the street. The “Covidiots”.
I was led
to all this “kangkalang” (my late father, and not Keith Rowley, taught me that
word many, many years ago) when considering current application of the word “zesser”.
It appears
that “zessing” has itself been the subject of linguistic evolution. Slow blinkers
like myself completely missed the moment when being a “zesser” turned from
being cool (while at the same time being somewhat excessive in fashion and
deportment) to be a mostly negative socio-cultural descriptor focused on
ethnicity and class.
“What is the
difference,” several Facebookers were asking on Sunday, “between a zesser party
and a (regular) party (or fancy wedding or DDI lime)?” The responses did not
vary widely and all focused on “who” participates and “where” such events occur
despite the pandemic.
Even the
police commissioner offered a definition of his own within the context of what
he considers to be the role of the police in the face of what is unlawful and,
not necessarily, what might be entirely “wrong” given the current context.
At that
point, I am minded to consider the profound nature of the issues that application
of the word has been forcing us to engage. I liken it to the euphemistic use of
place names such as “Laventille”, “Caroni” and “Westmoorings” – almost as
potent as openly racist use of the “N” and “C” words, Chinee, Veneez, Seereeyann,
and “de wonpasent”, but nuanced to include factors such as social class, official
rank and generational privilege.
“Zessing”
is thus a fairly complex phenomenon combining concepts of ethnicity, geographic
location, money and class. It also embraces legal principles associated with
private, commercial and public ownership and occupancy. “Zessing” is not applicable,
for instance, when an activity occurs on private property and involves people
who are of the “knife and fork” variety from “Laventille”, “Caroni” or other
areas.
Lawful
congregating (whatever the numbers or level of risk) must also meet the standards
of property ownership, money spent (“ka-ching ching”), aesthetics, cost of food
served, and music played.
No better occasion
than the height of a pandemic to unmask subterranean tensions, privilege and
entitlement. Significantly, we have also been exposed to how such issues routinely
resonate within official circles.
The early targeting
of the Sauce Doubles outlet at Curepe and not the fast food franchises across
the road. The removal of Fatboy doubles from the service station. The
youngsters face down on the sand. Fishermen blocked at the beach. The needless and
tedious legal lesson on private versus public spaces.
It all came
down to the incomparable Dr Avery Hinds on Monday to unveil the dreaded equaliser.
No politician. No business chamber. No trade union. No NGO. No lawyer. No
police commissioner. Just a committed medical professional and the grim truth.
It sounded more like a “waddap” than a “peshenwengweng” – finding its mark with
great accuracy and impact.
Dr Hinds politely
avoided the use of “jackass” as a verb, but he clearly suggested that “tout
moun” was the phrase being qualified. Whether you zessed in Caroni or partied
in Valsayn the virus could care less. A message quite neatly packed in our
collective pipe for smoking. A shot on target.
Of ruinous celebratory battlefields
November 18, 2020
Wesley Gibbings
I am sure I am not the only person noting that the Police willfully refuse to administer the law and/or moral suasion when it comes to the high incidence of dangerous noise pollution and the ensuing “public nuisance” at set times of the year.
Yes, I am suggesting that officers know when and where the bamboo-bussing (that too), fireworks and firecrackers are being discharged and they make a conscious decision not to intervene. This was the case over the Divali weekend and will again be the case in a few weeks.
I highlighted the “public nuisance” impact of the use of explosive substances at the top of this column because I am fully aware that in many instances their possession and use alone may not be actionable in a court of law. The Commissioner of Police made the point some time ago.
But the Summary Offences Act [Chapter 11:02] exists as a basis for police action on more than one count, including claims of “public nuisance”. This has been clarified from different angles by the EMA, the CoP himself and, repeatedly, by many others.
The fact though is that even in the absence of such knowledge or commitment, officers at police stations around the country know that pets harm themselves, run away and are severely traumatised whenever the neighbourhood blasts begin.
They are fully aware of the fact that the aged and infirm suffer through the days and nights when their communities are transformed into ruinous, celebratory battlefields littered with improvised explosive devices (IEDs).
It cannot be that the Police see no role for themselves when such pain and discomfort are being experienced. It cannot be that reliance on the fine points of law is the only trigger for official, preventative action against harm.
That said, whatever happened to the Explosives (Prohibition of Scratch Bombs) Order 2018? How many charges have been laid? How many convictions have been secured over the two years of its existence? Let’s have a look whenever boastful crime stats are next released.
Now, I don’t think it is the case that police officers are bad people. In many instances, they are among the most dedicated, selfless people in the world. I think the problem is that most of them, as is the case with many regular citizens, believe that at certain times of the year people need a little bligh to do things that are in keeping with things associated with presumed culture and tradition.
Therefore, on the evening of December 31, 2020 – COVID or no COVID, whatever the “zero tolerance” statements by politicians and the Police, the Seasonal Blitz can and will descend upon most of us again.
I have witnessed the blows repeatedly, and unfairly, administered upon the EMA for what many believe is abandonment of the country’s Noise Pollution Control Rules (NPCR).
As an aside, I came across an audit of noise complaints under the NPCR some year ago. Some of the main sources of concern included: Stereos/Radios (67%); Bars (12%); Welding/fabricating activities (5%); Air conditioning units (3%); Religious activities (2%); Compressors/generators (2%).
Not making excuses for the EMA, but basic research would find that the NPCR operate under regulatory guidelines that are not always applicable in instances where itinerant users of pyrotechnics and manufacturers of IEDs are active.
Yes, we have the Police, and we have the EMA, but there are also strong roles for civil society and faith-based organisations, communities and citizens in their own private right on this matter. It’s not only about Police and law.
This continued slur on our humanity persists because we are afraid to confront some painful truths about ourselves. COVID-19 is providing some guidance when it comes to such matters. When the smoke clears, let’s see progress on this one.
In the meantime, prepare for blast-off over the course of the next month and a half. Keep the pets safe. Keep Granny and Grandpa and ill relatives and friends out of the line of fire. Thankfully, we are already doing this for COVID reasons. Sadly, in this case, there are eminently manageable solutions we have chosen to ignore.
Popping the Caricom bubble
November 11, 2020
Wesley Gibbings
Last Saturday, PM Rowley did not bother to spend much time elaborating
on the reasons behind the popping of the proposed Caricom travel bubble in the
midst of the pandemic.
In short, as he and his regional colleagues have all
explained in equally terse terms, there are anomalous approaches to COVID-19
occasioned by a variety of structural, socio-economic realities.
This offered the prospect of an irresistible metaphor on the
state of the integration process.
I was drawn to consider such matters recently while addressing
a group of post-graduate UWI students on what I thought of the “conflicting
(developmental) agenda” of “Caribbean media discourses” in the face of what is
now recognised to be an environment characterised by “diverse voices.”
It turned out to be a huge challenge to contemplate a notion
of contrived “media discourses” with recognisable impacts on a sense of
Caribbean identity and development.
I had to turn to my 25-year-old son and some of his profound
and moving observations on the state of the nation as related to BC Pires in
another newspaper.
These included the following statement: “Trinidad hasn’t
been around long enough, as a country, to even really figure out what direction
we’re going in. That means we can make it absolutely anything we like. It’s not
even a choice we have to make.”
It could be that Mikhail remembers me, even in his early
childhood, repeatedly regurgitating CLR James’s thesis on the absence of
“ancient habits” to explain the unfolding story of young nations.
Though I recognise there are many who do not acknowledge a
Caribbean paradigm or destiny, it is clear that this space will continue to be
“home” for the vast majority of us.
I however advised the UWI group to tread wisely along the
path of “identity” particularly when we have found ourselves not only to be in
the world, but to have the world in us.
I believe there is nothing esoteric or detached from lived
reality to engage such questions, especially at a time of social and economic
crisis. There are practical assignments to be engaged. Tangible deliverables to
produce.
For example, the requirements of a “single (Caricom) market”
and, eventually, a “single (Caricom) economy, require studious attention to what
is being defined as conditions of socio-economic singularity.
Who are the “I’s” and “We’s” of this collective? Is there really
a coherent ethnogeographic reality to be captured through official diagnosis
and prescription?
A quick quiz. How many of us know that the people of Belize
are today choosing a new government? That the constituency of St George North
in Barbados is electing an MP … as we speak? Do we know how many constituencies
were contested at the elections in St Vincent and the Grenadines last week? Do
we know who “we” are?
It is not all our fault as mere constituents, though. As I
reminded the UWI folk last week, the Caricom project has tended to (erroneously
and disproportionately) direct socio-cultural attention to the cricket-playing
Commonwealth Caribbean.
This is so despite the fact that in Belize, The Bahamas,
Haiti and Suriname, cricket is not as highly considered as elsewhere and is
absolutely irrelevant as a developmental signpost. This is a bubble already
popped.
Even so, there is also the question of whether there is a
recognisable common aesthetic to be captured.
In 1994, the West Indian Commission (WIC) cited the
attributes of “aboriginal decimation”, the “institution of slavery”, “the
crucible of plantation life” and “colonialism which deepened the sense of
economic and political powerlessness even while it reinforced the inheritance
of struggle against injustice and the yearning after self-determination.”
I would contend it’s all of the above and more. That if in
the post-pandemic Caribbean we were to reconvene the WIC, quite a different
narrative would need to be explored. This does not mean that all has fallen
down or that the integration bubble has popped. It means we now probably have newer
choices in carving a better destiny of our own.
Too good to be true
November 4, 2020
Wesley Gibbings
Growing up in a business-oriented family teaches you several
things. Among them is that if a deal appears too good to be true, it probably
is too good to be true.
This realisation comes up against at least three main dynamics
to which people both in their private lives and in business are subject, particularly
at times like these. These include economic necessity, greed, and a lack of
confidence in the formal financial sector.
The COVID-19 experience has intensified conditions of real economic
need, the greed of those who recognise such a vulnerability, and the malignant
behaviour of the commercial banking sector.
As more than a simple aside, we should have known that the banking
confidence problem is far more pervasive than previously thought when millions
of dollars in cash were somehow found to be cashed-in last year in exchange for
new $100 bills.
Under all of these conditions, average everyday folks become
prone to predatory behaviour in the form of deals that sound too good to be
true and are operated by opaque people and organisations unable to publicly
declare the source of promised, excessive returns.
But it is not enough to know who these people are, or that
receipts are being produced or that ledgers are being kept. A key question must
focus on the true source of the extraordinarily high returns.
If, when asked, such operators are unable to satisfactorily
explain the process through which $100 becomes $1,000 – and it is not from
advantageous money-lending, money-laundering or some form of magic - then it
would not require much of an acquaintance with the principles of financial
literacy to raise a massive red flag.
If the response is that the $900 return on an investment of
$100 is subject to the investments of new entrants to the scheme, you have the
classical conditions for operation of a “pyramid” or “Ponzi” scheme. There are
differences between the two, but my father used to describe such operations as
the process of digging one hole to fill another.
The larger the operating space, the longer the excavating of
an eventually unfillable hole would take. For example, people who invested
their money in the enterprises run by Allen Stanford came from an extensive
international pool.
It took aggressive, enlightened policing to uncover the true
nature of the scheme, or else it would have continued for a much longer time. In
the end, over 18,000 people lost their money.
The PR was on point and the environment welcoming to the
gentleman who is now serving a sentence of 110 years for operating an elaborate
Ponzi scheme. He is known to have financially rescued the government of Antigua
and Barbuda several times and once famously landed a helicopter with a treasure
chest of cash on the wicket of Lord’s Cricket Ground. The fact that it was all
fake US$ cash on board the helicopter was rich with ominous symbolism.
There are other spectacular Caribbean examples where the
same principle of digging one financial hole to fill another applied. People
who keep an eye on these things in T&T and Jamaica can instantly call the
names of enterprises that eventually ran out of hole-filling space after
promising above-market rates of return on investments.
Within the last few months, this also occurred at a smaller scale
in Barbados and Guyana where the financial terrain is much more limited. I have
myself seen text messages that describe the agony of people who have lost
pension lumpsums and substantial savings.
This is not easily dismissible as acts of greed on the part
of most “investors/subscribers/members”. These are seriously challenging times
for a lot of people who do not believe they can or will be adequately accommodated
by the formal financial services sector.
What is probably needed is an honest civil society player to
broker a process of financial literacy awareness building. Sadly, people are
not inclined to gravitate toward officialdom, the banks or politicians when it
comes to reliable guidance on such matters.
While we await such an intervention, there are people whose
trust stands to be betrayed. Those who believe there is political or sectarian
advantage to be gained by all of this can also probably be described as being
as cruel and as vile as those who promote these schemes as something of real
benefit.
A United States of the Caribbean
October 21, 2020
Wesley Gibbings
Few of us in my small circle of friends were able to avoid Barbados prime minister Mia Mottley’s address to the virtual opening of the first Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) Pivot Event last Friday. I have been tagged and spammed and Whatsapped on it numerous times. Have you?
There is little doubt that for a very long time, the regional integration project has not benefited from such eloquent support from a practicing, office-holding politician, especially when the subject is being dissected into the constituent elements of actionable agenda items.
This is notwithstanding the fact that at successive Caricom events our leaders, without exception, pronounce ritualistically and ambitiously on the prospects for a heightened level of regional cohesion.
Just listen to them when they meet again at the COVID-delayed annual summit on October 29.
I have been around long enough to have heard for myself the offerings of politicians in office, from Manley to Manning, on this question of a collective destiny for the Caricom version of the Caribbean.
In the late 80s I was also at the St Lucian edition of Regional Constituent Assembly (RCA) consultations on a political union of the Windward Island states comprising Dominica, Grenada, Saint Lucia and St Vincent and the Grenadines.
Yes, there were the deliberations of the West Indies Commission, but the RCA discussions were deep and sincere and absolutely meaningful.
However, the form a Windward Islands union ought to take proved difficult to negotiate and Grenada, from my reading of the RCA’s final report of 1992, was not included among those supportive of the notion of a “unitary state”.
The other forms explored included a federation along the lines of the ill-fated West Indies Federation of 1958 - 1962, and a confederal system à la Canada for which now-prime minister but then-opposition politician Dr Ralph Gonsalves strenuously argued.
I have noted the Vincentian leader’s thinking on this has now evolved into one more reflective of the regional realpolitik.
There were also discussions, during the RCA meetings, on various constitutional models including arrangements borrowed from Westminster, a “Swiss-type” executive presidency and the “US-model”.
Yes, Windward Islands politicians and civil society representatives went so far as indeed the Shridath Ramphal led West Indian Commission which also published its report, Time for Action, in 1992.
But PM Mottley chose not to open that particular box. Instead, she proposed in her IDB address a regional “collective” mandated to execute a joint Caribbean developmental “pivot” employing the advantage of “scale.”
In that sense, while Ms Mottley proposed a transactional shift from disparate efforts to a more synergetic approach, she studiously avoided the far more difficult but ultimate question of whether the 15 Caricom emblems should not someday become a single flag.
For, this is far more than a crisis-led economic “collective” and calls for a sense of “cultural confidence” in excess of the current stocks.
This is not all pie-in-the-sky, though. There was much to its discredit, but the West Indies Federation offered a political and economic channel to joint independence that we refused.
It can even be argued that as colonies the prospect of total collapse did not exist as it does now. The buffer of imperial support no longer exists, economic structures have been found to be brittle, the multinational institutions are exhausted, and the proceeds of reparations won’t guarantee continued viability. It has in fact taken pandemic conditions to remind us of these intrinsic fragilities.
Today, we also have Guyana, which was not a member of the federation. It is however now a key member of Caricom on the cusp of economic leadership of the region – whatever its self-destructive politics and the irresistible temptation to consider destinies outside of the regional project.
In any event, the next step toward a single flag has to begin with the actions of a “coalition of the willing” – a moniker increasingly assigned to our regional assignments. COVID-19 has changed some of this, if only because the survival dynamics dictate compulsion.
From January 1, it’s T&T’s turn at the Caricom helm. Those who had previously denied the movement’s relevance are now scrambling to the table … for the time being at least. All eyes will be on PM Rowley. Will he direct us all to the single flag?
Our developmental co-morbidities
October 14, 2020
Wesley Gibbings
The application of a now familiar medical term to matters of
social and economic development is no concoction of my own. I first heard
“pre-existing conditions” used in such a context by an ILO official when
describing the effective collapse of labour markets in Latin America a few
weeks ago.
On Friday, I deployed such usage as part of a question to a
World Bank official who had offered to Caribbean journalists a sub-regional
diagnosis indicating a combination of potentially fatal symptoms.
These include high public debt, deformed official
institutions, pervasive informality, ubiquitous economic single-baskets and
brittle sectoral structures.
Surely, I had suggested, such conditions needed to be
nuanced against peculiar regional antecedents. For, certainly, afflictions of
the viral kind present themselves differently from patient to patient.
The informal sector in some Caribbean countries, for
example, appears to have generally coped with the more extreme effects of the earliest
interventions.
This has been so, I would have thought, in the absence of
burdensome overheads, minimal social and business costs, and other structural
factors that have correspondingly led to permanent closures within the
established formal sector. The WB’s Martin Rama politely suggested that I did
not have such a good case.
Much like the ILO spokespersons before him, there was the
argument that the absence of strong social protections among workers in the
informal sector creates conditions for critical imbalances - low average wages
and weaknesses in human capital and health systems.
This is an important side issue (which I believe requires
closer contextual study) since it emphasises the now popular dictum that while
the pandemic has found the world floundering on the same troubled ocean, we
clearly occupy and operate vastly different vessels as nations, as discrete
communities and as sectors.
So it is, I presume, at Couva and Caura and Arima within the
parallel health system where COVID-19 patients are being monitored and treated.
There, particular emphasis is placed on vulnerabilities occasioned by
“pre-existing conditions” - no two patients being the same.
The fact though is that the pandemic met us in already poor
socio-economic shape. Most of us in the Caribbean have been in the High
Dependency Unit (HDU) for some time while others were already destined for the
ICU – however delusional we have been on questions of long-term viability.
Tourism, offshore financial services, special access
agriculture and global energy markets have the potential to function as unstable
single-pillar structures.
The reality is that whatever we think of ourselves from the
loft of relative wealth, T&T is mortally challenged by some of the more persistent
pre-existing economic conditions.
The current period has lifted the veil on our
vulnerabilities – conditions that influence the ways of governance in all its
facets – public, communal and private.
This is particularly true if we were to look at the
psycho-social issues of self-esteem, class and ethnic prejudice, and other wounds
of a colonial past that cohere in the form of cultural co-morbidities.
Here is to be found the “soft-tissue” of self-awareness – cognitive
dissonance expressed as clinical symptom. A pathology of diminished confidence.
The slow suicide of self-hatred.
From time to time during the course of our pandemic measures,
such afflictions have emerged. The doubles vendor in his new premises is shut
down while the brand name chicken outlet remains untouched.
High-rise partygoers get the bligh, while others taste
asphalt and learn the smell of guns. The beach ban is taken to the level of
legal technicality and verbose debate, even as others make it to social media face-down
like marooned Carite on the shore.
The best insights on the way forward for the world point to
a slowing of globalisation, increasing digitisation and an international
economy marked by striking inequalities. There is the prospect of things
getting much worse before the uptick to better days – vaccine or no vaccine.
This is a different world. Pre-existing conditions
exacerbated by the excesses we mistook for modernism are in our veins. The call
to personal and collective communal responsibility is a relevant as ever.
This is not unlike the challenge of two centuries ago when
we needed to claim our freedom and our future. In some areas we have not done
that badly, but we’re clearly not yet there. There are co-morbidities to eliminate.
There is a survival agenda to pursue.
Finding the leaders
September 23, 2020
Wesley Gibbings
I must confess that though I have served in senior positions
in the media, at the community level, and within professional organisations, I
am not naturally inclined to gravitate toward lectures and events focusing on
leadership development and practice.
No fanciful modernistic MBA stuff or post-mortem adulation for
me. For I have found that the conversations these things often generate tend to
omit important features of how our societies actually work.
Ironically enough, it was former Jamaica prime minister PJ
Patterson who remarked at a Bocas Lit Fest panel on the weekend, that it is
difficult to distinguish the accomplishments of Caribbean politicians, without
at the same time examining the role of senior public servants.
Kyron Regis’s superb reportage on the event in Monday’s
edition of this newspaper captures this dynamic of Patterson’s evaluation of
Caribbean leadership – samples of which are found in abundance in the former
PM’s autobiographical My Political Journey.
Officeholders, you see, are not necessarily analogous to the
nominal status of “leaders”. We see it every day. Many commentators have made
the point about the police commissioner. It’s a point to be made about
politicians, as well.
Now, I am not about to go all MBA on you, but my point is
that in the Caribbean (and I suppose elsewhere) there has been a tendency to
assign to politicians, professionals, academics, religious heads, and other
elite groups, the automatic mantle of “leadership.”
This is so when, in fact, their most important developmental
functions have to do with providing a facilitating environment for “grassroots”
leadership – to use another term I also do not like, but which captures the
essence of where I’m going with this.
In these pandemic days, this has come into view far more
starkly than it has in the past. Business leadership, for instance, has largely
emerged from our small and micro-enterprise sector in terms of its ability to
readily adapt to brand new conditions.
There is the mask-making industry that sprung up overnight
with outstanding results. The “curb-side” deliveries of fruit and vegetables.
The emergence of online sales platforms employing basic, everyday social media
channels.
Entertainers have filled important voids with music, poetry
and dance. There was no ministry of culture. No ministry of food production. No
ministry of industry. Just regular folks doing their thing. Providing
“leadership.”
Teachers, nurses, doctors, journalists, garbage collectors,
supermarket attendants, farmers, fisherfolk, street food producers, small
entrepreneurs, tailors, people simply doing what they do. Responding creatively
and imaginatively to unprecedented times.
Okay, so this can also be viewed as a function of a society
that has been designed and re-designed by people in political control. It might
also correspondingly be a function of the state as “tireless mother” – that contentious
ideological descriptor.
I am not sure. The university folks have probably studied
this to death. But all I wish to place on the table is the view that political office does not necessarily equate “leadership.”
Mr Patterson, for instance, presided over the government of
Jamaica between 1992 and 2006 as a sworn integrationist. There is no doubt
about this. My question to him on Saturday was: How come, in 2018, the (Bruce)
Golding Report unveiled fundamental, pervasive, multi-sectoral questions
surrounding his country’s embrace of the Caricom project? There was no time for
an answer.
Then there was Godfrey Smith on the Grenada Revolution and
his paean to the leadership of Maurice Bishop. I have only read the published
extracts, but Smith’s favourable verdict on Bishop would have had to ignore the
excesses of a failed experiment. It could not have been all everybody else’s
fault. Not even Bernard Coard’s.
I also asked Alissa Trotz about reconciling the late, iconic
Andaiye’s views on political and social transformation based on her early
engagement as a thought-leader within the Working Peoples Alliance (WPA) of
Guyana – an organisation from which she would later break. This, in the context
of the organisation’s rapid descent into virtual irrelevance in the face of its
participation in the embattled and unfortunate APNU+AFC ruling coalition of
2015-2020.
This region needs to look again at “leadership” and think
long and hard about what we mean by it. Who, in fact, is there to lead our
advance out of troubled waters. What are the desired positive outcomes.
I suspect we are looking in the wrong direction, and at the wrong set of people.
On Raymond Watts
September 16, 2020
Wesley Gibbings
I never got around to confessing to musician-turned-political philosopher Raymond Watts, but I was hopelessly lost trying to find him at his Diego Martin flat on March 23, 2018.
Yet, I had to maintain the confident disposition of someone who had prepared extensively for an interview on weighty matters.
“You found the place okay?” he asked. “Oh yeah. No problem.” I lied because I did not want to complain about having received the worst directions in the history of journalistic navigation.
En route, I had been thinking about an opening salvo that sounded erudite and profound. Not the stuff of a lost easterner who had run low on gas, had encircled the area twice, and threatened to head back home.
By the time I found the place, my mental notes had disappeared. There was to be a short, pointed, opening observation then a question about how, as a Trini musician, Watts had landed himself in the middle of revolutionary and intellectual celebrity in 1960s London and Montreal.
Then, there he stood at the gate, head craning as a child toward an ice cream van. There was parking inside – “they not coming back now.” No dogs – “not mine.” We had to rush inside because the rain was coming.
 |
| Raymond Watts |
Watts had sat at the feet of CLR James during the legendary London sessions with regulars and non-regulars such as Wilson Harris, Andrew Salkey, Norman Girvan, Walter Rodney and Sam Selvon.
As an unlettered musician who worked the transit system and factories, he laid claim to having “a terrible inferiority complex in that environment.”
I initially had in mind a first-hand account of what actually happened at the epochal Montreal Congress of Black Writers of 1968.
It was a moment in history described by David Austin in ‘Fear of a Black Nation: Race, Sex and Security in Sixties Montreal’ as having chaotically converged the forces of the Black Power Movement in the Americas.
The International Conference of Negro Writers and Artists (Présence Africain) hosted in Paris in 1956 and in Rome in 1959 had by then fertilised a global, political movement. Dr Eric Williams attended the 1959 version and other headliners included people such as George Lamming, Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon.
Watts wasn’t there, but he came to know the names and ideas through CLR and while working on the London trains and production lines, and gigging as a percussionist with famed T&T/Venezuelan musician Edmundo Ros.
From the minute he landed in Montreal years later – having consumed more than a little of CLR’s hybridised version of Black Internationalist Marxism – he was committed to, at minimum, attending a North American/Caribbean version of the Paris and Rome conferences.
There is disputed credit for the seeding of the Montreal idea, but Watts’ claim provided sufficient detail and texture to qualify his version.
He had to have been doing much more than name-dropping when he mentioned Lloyd Best’s rescue of the conference. Best was also later to (typically and disruptively) complain of too little speaking time at the event.
There was, as well, the Black Panthers’ troublesome participation. They had grumbled about “too many white people” and convened a rowdy, parallel event at the same venue.
Then came the drama surrounding Walter Rodney’s delayed departure from Canada following a Jamaica ban and the fear of assassination should he return to Guyana.
The conference ended in predictable confusion. Apart from Austin’s account, there is no cohesive record of what transpired. Watts earned passing mention as the guy who led the Raymond Watts Combo at the official opening of the conference.
The hours spent during two sittings with Watts in 2018 however yielded a far more intimate connection with the circumstances before, during and after an event that helped change black activism in this part of the world.
Watts was Black Lives Matter Caribbean style before our current awkward engagement of the slogan in these parts. In 2011, he published From Colonialism to Capitalist Democracy: A Failed Option for Trinidad.
I tried to reach him several times since the 2018 encounters. He had moved. He was ill. There was an issue with his phone.
On September 1, his faithful comrade Rae Samuel found the 82-year-old revolutionary dead in an Arima apartment where he lived alone. I received the text message. There are times when you are lost.
(A video recording of portions of the interview with Watts can be found here: https://youtu.be/vEnfMKUZB3M)
Health equity and
privilege in the pandemic
September 9, 2020
Wesley Gibbings
From the very blurry start, it was always evident that apart from preventing and/or managing its propagation, a principal objective of our national COVID-19 strategy has been to protect our most vulnerable from suffering and possible death.
The many (for whom the pandemic is likely to spare its worst effects) are required to offer up sacrifices in exchange for the well-being of the few who have proven to be disproportionately at risk.
In the course of human history, this is not an entirely new proposition. Our societies now generally prefer progressive systems of taxation. There are concessions for the aged and otherwise disadvantaged. We exercise special care for children. And social medicine has long existed as a superior alternative to any system that equates an ability to pay with the right to live.
Under pandemic conditions, vulnerability does not only include medical status but also reflects equity dynamics.
Sadly, in T&T, the pandemic has exposed an unwillingness by many to sacrifice rights, recreation and revenue for responsibility to others. This obtains in part because of a sense of privilege and entitlement.
Such a scenario represents the absence of what health communicators describe as “health equity” – situations in which “privilege” applies unevenly in the accessing of resources.
Transportation privilege comprises masks in the maxis but not in Audis or high-end cars that will never be used as PH cars or have anyone else but family as passengers.
Employment privilege that scoffs at the plight of people awaiting grants and relief packages. Privilege that recognises the spranger before the human.
Technology privilege that does not recognise a digital divide that makes possession of device without connectivity near worthless. Age privilege because some need to party.
Financial privilege to skip the public health queue and to access private resources.
It is of course not an easy situation. Medically, as has been the situation everywhere else, we have been confronted by the unknown. Our officials have thus resorted to slavish, conservative adherence to evolving regional and international protocols as preferred official option.
It is an approach that presents the explicit risk of erring on the side of caution while placing us all in the same basket. Minimising risk while demanding a high level of personal and communal responsibility with accompanying egalitarian benefits.
An eschewing of privilege and a recalibrating of social norms to assure greater social justice. Yes, we are on the same ocean. But onboard different vessels. Not only as countries, but as private individuals and communities.
It is also difficult to legislate a duty to care. Almost as intractable as lawmaking to sustain love. “A state of emergency,” the prime minister exclaimed at the outset, “won’t make you wash your hands.” Yet, we needed punitive fines to get people to wear face masks.
It is of course perfectly understandable and necessary that informed, critical scrutiny of discrete measures would flow. Nobody ever suggested uncontested measures.
Reporters have thus asked sometimes awkwardly framed but valid questions based on growing public concern and, at times, contrasting regional and international interventions.
On this very page, Dr David Bratt has been lending an important, critical eye. Elsewhere, people who understand these things have contributed other knowledgeable views.
Sadly, self-serving, ill-advised political commentary based in part on COVID-denial, conspiracy theory, privilege and medical myth has too frequently found space in the social discourse.
Among the more odious phenomena has been the slandering of high-quality public professionals who have consistently presented sound information and diligent guidance.
There was also much in the recent election campaign to generate loathsome revulsion. The second-guessing of expert advice. The open defiance of measures to save lives. Unsubstantiated conspiracy theories about the data indicting scores of national and regional public servants.
Then to hear about a supposed lack of “measures”. What “measures”, if not the “measures” to achieve the simple tasks of hand hygiene, physical distancing and the proper wearing of face masks?
The fact is, nobody, anywhere, has been getting everything right. There have been slip-ups here and everywhere. But there has also been universal agreement on the need to protect the more vulnerable.
Health equity to achieve such an end requires much more than we have so far exhibited in our space. Privilege has instead reigned. What a shame.
Pandemic politics, media and elections
September 2, 2020
Wesley Gibbings
Close Caribbean election watchers must certainly be noting
the concurrence of electoral encounters and pandemic conditions.
In more than one instance, governments have not held out
until the latest possible dates and have instead called elections well within
constitutional limits but under conditions of closed borders and other
measures.
This was so in T&T which could have delayed the process
until December. It is also the case with Jamaica, which last went to the polls
on February 25, 2016 but holds its elections tomorrow.
Belize which has habitually gone to the polls early – a year
short for three of the last four elections – holds its elections on November 1
when it could have waited until February 2021.
It also appears St Vincent and the Grenadines will go to the
polls before the December 9 anniversary of 2015 elections. There is already
considerable political mobilisation.
Suriname held its elections on May 25 – a date fixed since
its return to democracy in the late 1980s but changeable under certain
circumstances.
Anguilla had its encounter on June 29 and, like Suriname,
the Dominican Republic and Guyana, experienced a change in administration. In Anguilla,
elections were held despite colonial advice to delay.
In St Kitts and Nevis, closed borders restricted the
permissible practice of parachute voting by non-resident nationals.
Guyana, which also changed political administration, is another
story on its own. Its March 2 regional and general elections set in train a
series of events that continues to today. On Monday, for example, the losing
APNU+AFC coalition filed an election petition challenging the highly
contentious results.
As a media trainer, I have been fortunate to have come into
relatively close contact with some key electoral players in T&T, St Kitts
and Nevis, Grenada, Suriname, Guyana and yesterday, for the second time, in St
Vincent and the Grenadines.
One of the key subjects we cover during these exercises is
the near inelastic relationship between the standard of media practice and the quality
of electoral outcomes, including perceptions of the legitimacy of the process.
The importance of this is heightened by the fact that in a
growing number of countries – Grenada and Barbados being glaring exceptions –
margins of victory have shrunk. There is an intensification of political polarisation
and tribalism, and the performance of electoral boards has come under growing (and
sometimes unjustified) negative scrutiny.
T&T is also not the only “50-50 country” in the region.
Guyana’s current parliamentary balance is 33-31-1. In 2015 it was 33-32 in
favour of APNU+AFC which lost in March. Jamaica’s 2016 elections gave the JLP a
32-31 majority. In St Vincent and the Grenadines in 2015, the ULP won 8 of 15
seats and the NDP 7. It was the same in 2010.
In Suriname, post-election coalitions are routine, except
for 2015 when the NDP won a clear majority (26 of 51 seats) for the very first
time. This year, Desi Bouterse’s NDP struggled with 16 seats, leaving Chan
Santokhi’s VHP to lead a fresh coalition with 20 seats.
The Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) experience proves
the point about media performance. This year’s elections were conducted minus voluntary
media guidelines, the monitoring of adherence to them, and “refereeing” of the
findings of an independent institution.
In 2015 guidelines were established, but a dedicated
mechanism as had obtained since 2006, disappeared. The (now-ruling) PPP did not
consider it a priority then, despite generous offers of international funding.
When APNU+AFC took office, it too ignored this model, and an embattled GECOM
simply did not have the time and space.
In Jamaica, the Electoral Commission has revised media
protocols election day media coverage to permit better coverage tomorrow. A
good baby step forward.
In T&T, there is space for independent monitoring of a
voluntary Code of Conduct for media and professional evaluation of journalistic
performance based on such standards. Read the Election Handbook for Caribbean
Journalists edited by Lennox Grant and myself for greater guidance on this.
This can help direct attention away from partisans focused
on discrediting the work of professional journalists, and ill-advised judgments
on the work of legacy media based on social media rumour, disinformation and
sheer slander.
But as is the case virtually everywhere, tribal cleavages
continue to trump reasoned application of mechanisms that help diminish
conflict. It’s no different here. We are all left to pay a heavy price.
Analogue mindsets and digital language
August 26, 2020
Wesley Gibbings
I know. I know. The headline reads like an introduction to
the thesis of a techno-snob, which I am not. In fact, as a child of the analogue
era, I am instinctively drawn to digital technology as the outcome of a bridge
crossed. A language interpreted. A frame repositioned. An arduous journey into
new territory.
On the other hand, my 25-year-old son is a digital native
who engages no such challenges in interpreting his music, words or images. It
is the first and main language of his craft.
In my case, it is much like my basic-to-intermediate
Spanish. I am inclined to arrange my thoughts and ideas before consulting with
a rather limited range of nouns, verbs and woefully deficient descriptors. Only
then, upon their translation, are my thoughts anywhere near intelligible to the
Spanish-speaker.
At the radio station, we used scalpels and scotch tape to
edit audio. At the newspaper, there were scalpels as well, to “cut and paste”
artwork before it was ready for “shooting” and reproduction as negatives.
Today, processors and applications handle them all.
My wife, however, is an IT veteran of over 40 years who
learnt to code in mysterious languages no longer widely employed. At our home,
in the early years, there were beige-tinged data “punch cards” everywhere. The
“mainframe” computer at work occupied a room the size of a two-bedroom HDC
house.
For her, the modern digital reality was never far off –
zeroes and ones from the start providing an essential vocabulary.
Today, we are called upon to embrace what is being described
as a “digital transformation” – an amorphous process involving a wide variety
of new and emerging technologies and applications.
Yet, there appears almost everywhere to be a deliberate
effort to leapfrog what I think are some important features of the required
conditions. They include human capacity, at all levels, to execute the
transition.
The experts, and I have one in the house, speak of
“system-based process optimisation” as a key component of “change management” –
lofty expressions that point to both human resource and technological
transitions.
As a consequence of the frequent omission of the human
element, we often have transitions managed and engaged essentially by people
who require translation/interpretation services themselves. The outcomes are
often garbled and meaningless.
I have developed the terrible habit of scanning the desktops
of the business executives, politicians and educators with whom I come into
contact.
If I see piles of files and bits of paper, I respond
differently from when I see laptops, tables and smartphones. I am tempted to
make judgments about the level of technological interpretation required, and
about their own capacity at the helm at a time of transition.
I am also not always exceedingly confident about what is on
offer when I don’t see 25 and 30-year-olds at the controls.
In their absence, the expectation tends to be on
infrastructure and processes to execute old tasks better – as
interpretation/translation - rather than on changing the language from one to
another.
Look closely and you will see why the government grants’
process went off-track recently and why the mere automating of official
transactions has not added substantial value in other areas.
This, in my view, is not solely a matter of mechanical
transformation, but one that grapples with issues of personal and corporate
mindsets and organisational culture.
Hopefully Senator Allyson West, who now heads a new ministry
of public administration and digital transformation, together with technology
expert, Minister Hassel Bacchus, are mindful of this.
By now, as well, I should think they have begun assembling a
cadre of young digital natives who understand and speak the language of real
change.
Such a transformation ought not to focus on doing the old things better, but rather on doing new things well.
Between 1984 and 2020
August 19, 2020
Wesley Gibbings
I made the mistake, even at this time, of taking the advice of Comrade BC Pires to venture (again) between the covers of George Orwell’s classic ‘1984’.
If you’ve done the same, you would know that re-reading the book is always like encountering it for the very first time – your own personal, contemporary context determining the things to which you pay the most attention and consider vitally important.
I’m not one of those literary types who has explored multiple academic interpretations of the book. So, my current concern about the main character’s faltering self-determination under authoritarian circumstances might not be a unique or original finding.
Even more, you realise that exposure to dystopian fantasy can effectively illuminate the habits of farce. It can also help dissect the ways of the conspirator and unveil the maze of institutions, people and systems required to sustain an illusion of ordered disorder.
You see, I took BC’s advice on the heels of Guyana’s post-elections trauma, and in the midst of our own engagement of the joint challenge of the coronavirus and elections.
I have been reading 1984 and moving from Kindle to newspaper and back again. I saw the Guyana Elections Commission and the Elections and Boundaries Commission being crunched like eggs out of the same box. Like vanilla and strawberry in an ice cream sundae. Thriving on the buds of the unknowing.
Two institutions that are so unlike the other as to conjure up, through skewed messaging, an image of forced miscegenation every time they are referenced as somehow entwined.
Recounting T&T was not the same as recounting Guyana. Fern Narcis-Scope is not Keith Lowenfield. The PNC is not the PNM and the UNC not the PPP. People need to pay greater attention to fact and details and not to old talk.
In the end, tales of a grand conspiracy were unmasked in one instance as arguable criminal malpractice, and evidence of the simple but painful pangs of defeat on the part of the other. In each case, though, the stuff of destructive dysfunction and farce.
I have heard of elaborate plots requiring more moving people, places and parts than it takes to have an engine turn wheels. Images of otherwise listless and robotic clerks, technicians, communication people, drivers, dispatchers and politicians locked in at the Ministry of This and the Ministry of That, doctoring and delaying.
Each step of the way as I read, I became Winston in the alcove with a pen and blank (yes, blank), but pregnant pages, furtively putting the first words down - an unremarkable date followed by rambling recollections as if in a state of “sheer panic”.
It must be the COVID. It must be the virus. How could self-destruction be so studiously crafted? Depravities so entrenched and engrained?
Here, in this small space, there is a silence brought on more by deafness than the absence of noise. Slow self-mutilation by the rusty, jagged blades of delusion. “Manufactured fear,” said one dismal contestant. “It eh have no Covid here,” went one devotee.
That the recent months have brought us to this point signals that in the clearing before us, if there has to be one, is a passageway that’s not as brightly lit as we require.
We do not and have not always wished each other well. Injury to one, you see, equals justifiable injury to the other – that toxic concoction of aloes and peanuts.
Winston eventually emerged from his imprisonment, and the world was in fact in worse shape, much crueler than he had imagined.
Not one single chapter has actually closed, and none will be for some time to come. Elections and pandemic will remain for some time like Winston’s ubiquitous telescreens.
On my Kindle, ‘1984’ is four books down from Christopher Wylie’s Mindf..ck. I switch from one to the next over coffee and coconut water. I take them to bed and to my sleep where they take aim at my dreams.
Pandemic governance and change
August 12, 2020
Wesley Gibbings
Now that the brief and bitter election campaign has ended,
here’s hoping the post-election process is not unduly delayed and we settle
down to business sooner rather than later. We only have to consider Guyana’s
recent agony and the psychical injury sustained by all.
Under the lingering, durable shadow of a pandemic, we are
now called upon to consider our survival options at levels that span the
personal, private and public spaces we all occupy as citizens.
Politicians and their devotees now have room to address the
denial that occasioned so much of what obtained over recent weeks. It was an
affliction sustained across the political aisle.
The campaign was a relatively short but unique one. The
dissolution of parliament in July occurred in the midst of urgent pandemic
mitigation efforts.
The election call meant that while the work of the Cabinet continued
- guided in large measure by the urgent work of the health ministry - there were
grounds for reasonable concern about the absence of a high level of bipartisan political
oversight over a variety of state functions.
These included matters of pandemic expenditure, adjustments
to schooling arrangements, and foreign policy positioning, among others – all services
a functioning parliament could have critically interrogated.
These subjects never quite gained traction over the course
of the campaigns as other far less worthy issues rose to prominence. There was
never really a clinical, independent dissecting of these matters – just unsubstantiated
invective and cussing.
This is not to suggest deliberate malpractice, but simply to
say that a high and diligent level of civil society and political scrutiny had
not featured prominently. Most appeared otherwise occupied in providing open
and tacit tribal support through name-calling, sniping and vile hostility.
The early convening of the new parliament should promptly
attend to these issues. To be fair, there has been a significant effort to allay
suspicion regarding pandemic expenditure. However, the opportunity now exists,
especially in view of a forthcoming national budget exercise, to eliminate any
doubt.
This period also provides the new administration with an
opportunity to review the issues that led to the bungling of arrangements for
disbursement of relief packages. With the election out of the way, there is now
no convenient, political escape route.
For instance, when my wife publicly observed, on behalf of
her employee, that the salary review grant was being delayed as a result of an
absurd resort to manual methods when an automated system was available, it was virtually
dismissed as yet another politically instigated annoyance. This is a bad habit
that must be kicked.
There are clear bureaucratic obstacles and human capacity
issues to be addressed that would require an honest, systematic examination of
how the public service works.
In fact, assigned the task of moderating public consultations
on a review of the public service about seven years ago, I never got the impression
that the officials presiding over the process were as committed to the exercise
as were the “public” and selected sectors whose views were being entertained.
In the end, absolutely nothing came out of it. There needs
to be an independent review that reduces the active involvement of the people whose
practices and systems are being examined.
The new parliament – and I am proposing a greater role for
bipartisan behaviour here – must also have a close look at the ways the pandemic
will continue to affect the way we do business, learn, play and entertain
ourselves.
Now that the folly of politically motivated COVID-denial has
been settled by a virtual referendum on treatment of the subject, our country
needs to get to these tasks in a much more wholesome manner to address the demands
of a new era.
Though it appeared as a marginal area of concern by most
during the campaign, the fact of a pandemic has to be actively engaged by all.
The conduct of recent weeks however provided evidence that political will and possible
political sacrifice for the sake of COVID-19 could not prevail over a
compulsion to win.
We need to fix this. We need to fix many things.
Elections and pandemic politics
August 5, 2020
Wesley Gibbings
By this time next week, a government of our choice would
have been elected in T&T – barring any urgent drama associated with the
current season or the pandemic.
As discussed here previously, we are not the only ones to
have ventured onto electoral terrain in the midst of the COVID-19 challenge. In
the Caribbean alone, we have witnessed contests in Anguilla, Dominican
Republic, Guyana, St Kitts & Nevis and Suriname.
True, Guyana went to the polls on March 2 at the early onset
of the virus there, but contention over the results was resolved in court and subsequently
at the Guyana Election Commission only on Sunday. So, while election day was
not seriously affected by COVID-19, the overall elections process occurred
under, and was affected by, pandemic conditions.
The other four all had elections under the cover of special
arrangements arising from the virus. Three of them experienced changes in
government – Anguilla, Dominican Republic and Suriname. The ruling Team Unity
government in St Kitts and Nevis held on to office, election petitions notwithstanding.
I have previously attempted to explain how the mechanics of
these elections had been affected by COVID-19 safeguards, but not spent any
time on how the pandemic may have impacted the outcomes. As Monday approaches,
and as the campaigning enters the homestretch, I think it would be worthwhile
to consider a few points.
The first is that while incumbency may have the benefit of a
record of generally positive mitigative public health measures, it also bears
the undeniable stamp of economic decline and stagnation and all this implies
for general social and economic wellness.
Desi Bouterse paid the price for this in an already
economically depressed Suriname, as did Gonzalo Castillo’s PLD in the Dominican
Republic.
The second point is that while state management of the medical
challenge (in the absence of crisis conditions) makes for interesting campaign fodder
- including a level of gross public silliness - the intrinsic connection
between a pandemic and medium to long-term national development cannot be
ignored.
Because of this, reasonable people are constantly compelled
to consider the ubiquity or absence of pandemic nuanced initiatives in the
design and presentation of campaign promises, manifestos and proposed
programmes of development.
This is particularly the case since it is an indisputable
truth of our time that the coronavirus pandemic will be with us in measures not
of weeks or months, but of years. This has long passed the stage of
COVID-denial and scepticism, outlandish conspiracy and/or superstition.
There are no aliens or micro-chips or demonic violations,
just humans and a virus and everything in between that joins or seeks to unjoin
the two – with science hopefully incarnate as personal and communal knowledge
and behaviour.
In this context, politics prevail in this era purely to
bridge the gap between public intervention and personal action – as an
instrument or tool, not as a treatment nor a cure. That is the job of science. It
is the duty of politics to ensure the scientific imperatives are met and to
consider the “balance” between lives and livelihoods.
As I’ve said, we have not been the only ones to pass this
way. Neither has it been a completely unique set of circumstances in the modern
era. We were somewhere near here before in the face of the HIV pandemic decades
ago – denial, ignorance, the absence of science, and a failure to understand
vital behavioural connections. HIV has never gone away.
It is thus difficult today to contemplate a political
campaign that excises, from its contextual foundations, the fact of a pandemic.
Much of what I have seen and heard from some so far reeks of decided
COVID-denial, a lack of scientific foundation, and evident blindness to the new
global realities that have resulted.
For instance, there is no rational discussion on the future
of the energy sector that does not include the vagaries of global productive
capacity and markets in the face of pandemic conditions.
There is no contemplation of ameliorative social measures in
the absence of a framework that recognises deepening, systemic inequity –
different vessels on the same troubled ocean.
Put this way, there is quite a lot to be ignored between now and next Monday in the midst of the heat and hubris. In the shadow of looming danger there is sometimes precious little light.
Elections - the missing Caricom link
The COVID-19 labour challenge
Social Media Lessons of the Lockdown (LOL)
Of Covid and other media challenges
T +T the tireless mother
Don’t be surprised if Panorama 2021 (if it happens) does not look anything like what we have known in the past.
April 22, 2020
April 15, 2020
April 1, 2020
March 25, 2020
March 18, 2020
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