Elections and migrant policy

(First published in the T&T Guardian on June 28, 2023)

It took Miriam Aertker, head of an international inter-governmental agency occupying often controversial space in T&T to remind everybody that, one week ago, the global UN system was calling on people everywhere to take a moment to recognise World Refugee Day.

“Refugees and asylum-seekers are uplifting the communities they live in,” Aertker is quoted as saying last Sunday at Refugee Day observances in Chaguanas – a community that has become emblematic for its embrace of the phenomenon.

Few others ventured to engage the subject on June 20, even as the fury and hubris of campaigning for local government elections and an otherwise packed and heated public agenda occupied hearts and minds.

There are sufficient signals in the public space to suggest that our country’s messy engagement of international and humanitarian law, against the backdrop of stated commitments to convention and best practice have painted an unimpressive picture of where we as a nation stand on this important issue – whatever the poor examples set by the big and wealthy.

In addition to the technical nuances of our migrant challenges – and bear in mind we are not speaking only about Venezuelans now resident in T&T – there are underlying questions related to the entire nation’s predisposition on a matter on which we have, over time, been both subjects and objects.

All of this should thus not confound us as much as it apparently has. The (Venezuelan) registration process, for example, exhibits the several confusions. Important questions regarding the persistence of the challenge of Venezuelan migration and the pervasive positive and negative outcomes that are likely are in need of clear answers.

Had there been better informed policy, guided by a body of consistent political and public opinion informed by an understanding of the main socio-political principles involved to achieve peace, cohesion and productive outcomes, there would have been no need for current ad hoc and improvised arrangements.

The conduct of the process appears to reflect official indecision and imprecision in applying set guidelines and principles.

Even so, the political combatants have not been consistent with their public messaging on this question. The “close the borders” crowd now confusingly straddles continuing xenophobic resistance and ill-defined proposals for reform, some of which betray an ignorance of what is required to ensure compliance with humanitarian imperatives and our own underdeveloped policy infrastructure.

I am, by the way, composing this while at work in a country, Sierra Leone, that has had more than its fair share of refugee challenges. During a civil war waged between 1991 and 2002, thousands of nationals fled violence that led to at least 50,000 deaths and devastating injuries that remain evident as disability statistics. When voluntary repatriation was offered in 2008, a majority returned.

There is evidence that in the case of Venezuelan migrants in T&T, there has been a notable degree of repatriation and re-assimilation on the mainland. There has not been the same horrific violence witnessed 20 years ago where I am, but a similar requirement for orderly processes to find acceptable space both at home and in host countries.

Meanwhile, back in T&T, the political aspirants with eyes fixed on August 14, have found little to be attractive in the issues associated with democracy and rights, and the vast potential of those who now not only share space with us, but have become an interwoven element of our social fabric.

This is clearly an issue that has the potential to substantially boost our democratic credentials. But we have not always seemed prepared to pick up the political tab.

All the things we treasure and love – enterprise, music, art, sport, food – now find broader even more diverse space in the face of our already well-known heterogeneity.

But, even as Aertker spoke, not one political party was busily asserting concern about the plight of people living in this small space; perhaps out of fear that this would offer evidence of inconsistency with current political messaging.

The current scenario does not engender significant optimism. Children remain out of school, some newborn have reportedly not been registered, the provision of primary health care has been inconsistent and challenging, and secondary and tertiary care are, by way of practice, explicitly excluded as an entitlement at state facilities under our 2019 health policy for non-nationals.

Last week, the UN Secretary-General António Guterres reminded everyone of our “duty to protect and support refugees - and our obligation to open more avenues of support. This includes solutions to resettle refugees and to help them rebuild their lives in dignity.”

Was anyone here paying attention?

Pan’s great hope

The recent Pan in the 21st Century/Pan Down Memory Lane competitions staged by Pan Trinbago helped reinforce the numerous features of pan as more than a versatile percussive instrument the world came to know in its current general manifestation almost 100 years ago.

The conduct of these concurrent competitions, featuring single pan and scaled-down conventional bands, was categorically dismissive of the unfortunate view that the steelband as a socio-cultural construct is not a powerfully instructive model for wider socio-economic/cultural development.

Only those who pay little attention to what has been happening over the years would deny such value. It however remains a state of ignorance from which key decision-makers in politics, business, industry, and education need to awaken.

Ironically, the staging of the event less than five months after a phenomenal Panorama competition also proved that competitions – important as they are – do not a steelband movement make.

Pan Trinbago is best placed as a facilitative organ of the movement. But its heartbeat emerges from a combination of geographical communities and communities of interest, and not from the bricks and mortar of a registered institution.

President Beverley Ramsey-Moore appears to understand some of this and, whatever the licks she can and will (justifiably) sustain on some matters of regulation and detail, she has proven capable of engaging such a dynamic.

For instance, there is scope for revisiting the Panorama model including some contentious rules. My QRC pal, Eric McAllister, is one of several pesky advocates for change. These people need to be heard. Even so, Panorama is, indeed, the authentic ‘greatest show’, even as there is much more to pan than competition.

The fact is the mobilisation required to execute the 21st Century and Memory Lane competitions could not have been conjured out of nowhere or nothing. There is something in this that’s far more valuable than even the contributions of more prominent social institutions.

The “big guns” did not even have to be there, for this is something greater even than they.

Had we been learning from this model of social organisation many national difficulties could now have been addressed as routine matters.

For starters, how do we square claims about a so-called “lost generation” when so many well-disciplined young people turned up at practice, learned their notes, followed instructions, pushed the pans, and performed with looks of joy and satisfaction on their faces?

Who are these young people? Where do they come from? What “hopelessness" are you talking about? Will I see you at the panyard? Have you been to the shows? Have you witnessed joy in the face of considerable pain? Is all this fiddling while the city burns or ramajaying to reinforce important foundations?

Pan Trinbago can indeed significantly address the problem of over-reliance on state largesse, especially if it follows through on Ramsey-Moore’s commitment to finally erect its headquarters through a diversity of funding mechanisms.

However, there is also the even more important job of constructing a real pan theatre, several versions of which have already been imagined and designed. This, to me, is a state imperative with important business and other commitments.

It will help strengthen T&T’s claim to be the global hub for pan music and performance – a claim that has more benefits than are often immediately recognisable.

I sat at the June 11 finals, even as the rains threatened, and at times was so moved by what was on display that I cursed the numerous times I have uncritically heeded notes of hopelessness and despair.

There is no denying we face rather bleak times – full of murderous violence, vulgar political hubris, official and private incompetence, and a sense of incapacity as new perils emerge.

The panyards provide inspiration and guidance we dare not ignore.

Today, I also pay special tribute to winners First Citizens Supernovas and to Chord Masters. Richard de Coteau and the hugely talented Andre White led Chord Masters, the reigning Panorama Single Pan champs, to victory at Pan Down Memory Lane.

I am totally biased when it comes to Pan in the 21st Century winners First Citizens Supernovas though. Their Lopinot panyard is the most beautiful panyard I have ever visited, its players mostly young and wonderful, and its arranger, Amrit Samaroo, establishing himself among the leading, in this field, in recent history.

Have a long look at these bands and tell me what you see. Go past the expressions of unbridled joy on the faces of the players. Note the dexterity and skill. Calculate an average age. Have a look. Now go talk about hope and hopelessness.

Inconvenient flooding truths

So, it’s the rainy season and the flooding has already started. As a two-time flooding victim myself - albeit more than 25 years ago - I can tell you it ranks among the top saddest and most unpleasant human experiences.

The numerous human emotions that occasion slow and/or sudden washes of water through cherished belongings and the accompanying sense of regret, danger, and loss are difficult to describe and are best recorded only by people who have been there themselves.

This is thus not the kind of issue to explore through cynical, opportunistic political commentary or even the cold instruments of scientific observation. There is little that can comfort the affected. Insufficient sandbags to stem the flow of grief.

But it’s also a story that begins long before the advent of the rainy season. In my role as a journalism trainer, colleagues are perhaps fed-up of hearing me say that the flooding event in June is the culmination of the private and official behaviours of January.

Telling the story of June without referencing what happened in January is therefore often an unpardonable journalistic omission, especially since it’s a tale of pervasive malpractice at different levels.

The fact that this is a multi-dimensional issue makes it difficult to engage in a society at all levels set on applying simple, linear diagnoses to complex challenges. There is science, but this is also perilous emotional terrain.

For, yes, proper development planning has been almost absolutely absent over our independent years, but there are critical socio-cultural antecedents that are difficult to ignore.

So, the Town and Country Planning Division and other central and local agencies can be flagged for chronic, multiple failure; but independent citizen predisposition and behaviour are not to be overlooked.

For example, slash and burn agriculture on the hills “to make (an honest) dollar” in February, now flows in volumes of disassembled soil to fill the watercourses and to challenge production of potable water.

“Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink” – as if there exists a magical funnel in the sky to channel rainwater into the pipes that keep households, communities, industry, and commerce alive.

Then there is the ubiquitous role of “drainage” and embankments as cure-alls, important as they are, against the reality of extreme weather events, established geographical watersheds, and changing ocean tides. Surely, the hydrologists recoil in terror at the thought of island-splitting man-made torrents directed at a supposedly endless, accommodating sea.

It's also not simply a matter of litter - whatever its important, contributory role. That too, must end. But that’s not all there is to it.

It may well be the silent view of many experts in such things, that there are communities essentially unviable over the long term.

True, the same has been said of some nation states even as they persist - small in size, perennially endangered by nature, economically vulnerable, chronically under-developed, and evidently versed in acts of collective societal suicide.

But this is no cue for surrender. It is, instead, a call for decision-making that is cohesive, collective, and rooted in inconvenient facts.

It’s not a challenge unique to us in T&T. For example, I have lived and worked in Guyana and know that the challenge of Georgetown bears painfully obvious solutions largely left unspoken, and which no one dared utter ahead of Monday’s local government elections there.

I have also been to Belize where Belmopan became the nominal capital in 1970 when Belize City proved to be overly and expensively vulnerable to annual storms and hurricanes.

So many years later, the inland capital is yet to become the thriving hub of national life the original coastal city has remained. We learn from this that it clearly takes more than engineering and politics to address societal imperative and survival instinct.

In Jamaica last week, I witnessed the scourge of flooding in communities positioned along the banks of deep and shallow gullies where mountain run-off is noted to have become increasingly torrential.

It seems that everywhere in our region there is a need to sit around the tables of decision-making to work on ways to match science, politics, culture, and the proceeds of history. It calls for a significant downing of political and communal arms.

In our case, such an approach apparently confronts a gloomy future with advancing floods and accompanying pain and grief. There are hard facts left to be faced.

 

A time for poetry, music, and art

My friend and colleague, RAE, is still awaiting an online response to her suggestion that in bemoaning the absence of a financially meaningful role for creatives in sustaining national development, I had omitted mention of the objective contribution of industry and the economy, from which such attributes are ostensibly absent.

I am summarising a very brief social media exchange using more elaborate language than such platforms permit.

So, to be precise, this is what I actually claimed: “In a country so heavily reliant on creativity to sustain the cause of its survival, why is it so hard to convince people that creative work is “work” for which its originators and producers need to be respected and financially rewarded?”

RAE’s question was: “We rely on creativity to sustain us?” To which I replied: “What else is there?” Then came the retort: “I mean industry and economy …”

Well, that is actually what I meant. For, it is my opinion that in the absence of innovation and creativity, and acknowledgement of our creative assets as essential to progress in all sectors, we aren’t likely to engage the future with any degree of success.

If you think about it, there isn’t much else we have. Oil and gas and resulting commercial and industrial breathing space, together with tropical weather and abundant natural bounty are not really because of us. What has set us apart has almost always been, even in the spheres of business and industry, the creative impulse to do things differently.

When I speak about space for creative enterprise, I am not hinting at arbitrary state entitlements, legislated taste, or social engineering employing literature, drama, art, and music as anodyne for destructive, anti-social behaviour.

What I am hinting at is the ability to establish “creative industries" as a discrete component of economic development while permitting more room for the employment of creative imagination in industry, commerce, and government.

This is more than mere fanciful talk. We are, in a sense, constantly on the borderline of this. The current Pan in the 21^st Century/Pan Down Memory Lane event, for example, is once again displaying the value of pan as a form of socio-cultural organisation with value applicable to economic sustainability.

True, there needs to be an accelerated move away from gratuitous state largesse and attention to the conversion of such value to genuine economic wealth, but most of the vital ingredients already appear to be evident.

Additionally, pan provides a level of social participation which is a key condition of communal wealth creation. This is even before recognising that the world’s best pan makers, tuners, arrangers, and players are located right here.

One first step in all this, as I suggested in my terse social media post, is to recognise that creative endeavour has value beyond aesthetics and can contribute substantially to wealth creation.

At the moment, there is little recognition of this as people here do not generally consider the work of creatives as “real work” with financial value.

Some of you may have picked up on the explosion of art that awaited the end of pandemic measures. It is almost everywhere – painting, sculpting, printmaking. Those of us who have chosen not to be locked away through fear have been spoilt for choice.

Then there are the writers – increasingly proving their worth on all available stages. I won’t know where to start when it comes to the numerous names, but I have become an advocate of greater employment of newspaper pages for more literary contributions so as to ferret out the less conspicuous.

Last week, I also attended the Black Box screening of short films during the Africa Film Festival and found confirmation of my view that so much is happening on that front – of which I have substantial intimate knowledge – that our longstanding desire for a viable film industry cannot be too far away, if we pay closer attention to professionalising the numerous talents around while the state keeps a healthy distance away.

Then, pan apart, there is all this music! What do we do about all this music?

At this difficult, transitional time, there is a need for more poetry and music and art not as ends in themselves but as keys to a different kind of future. They are about the only things to keep us going in what can easily become a soulless, savage desert lacking in hope. I do not think we are there yet.

 

Some real local government questions

(Published in the T&T Guardian on May 25, 2023)

It’s very likely that by the time this is published there would have already been sufficient in the public space to make sense or nonsense of speculative offerings on Privy Council Appeal No 0016 of 2023 regarding the Local Government Reform Act of 2022, and what becomes of the resulting vacuum.

It is acknowledged, through majority decision of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (JCPC), that such legislation had had the illegitimate impact of extending the terms of office of local government representatives “not by the electorate but by the Government, which brought the amendments into force while those Councillors and Aldermen were still in office.”

There has been sufficient advised and mis-informed, partisan and independent commentary to signal a high degree of public interest in this matter, but this space is not about to be consumed by passions over the judgment.

It is also clear that elections should be announced. But there is another huge national assignment before us, to which insufficient attention is currently being paid, preoccupied as it is with Privy Council edict.

There is work to be done to move the concept of local government past its near absolute subservience to executive authority to a point of meaningful autonomous governance.

Since my first assignment as a local government reporter in the 1980s I have witnessed delays and lacunas of multiple varieties. So, the current situation does not alarm me very much.

In 2016, I was also invited to moderate public consultations on local government reform, and this space has since been used on numerous occasions to highlight the urgency of what was discussed, and the significant level of bipartisanship displayed.

Additionally, as a citizen, I have witnessed the degree to which local government performance frequently outweighs the value of parliamentary representation. For instance, I live in a community that has witnessed exchanges of partisan roles on several occasions with no change in this dynamic.

Today, what the JCPC judgment has done is to redirect our attention toward a much-neglected area of national life. It is important now, even as legal and political fallout is being assessed, to maintain some focus on dissecting the requirements of our local government environment.

This is important since the multiplicity of “little” things of community life often aggregate in values in excess of some of the “big” things at the national scale. Here is where “governance” comes to life through the delivery of social goods and services that make a difference in our day-to-day lives.

Most members of parliament who have transitioned from local government are easily recognised by their attention to the fine details of service delivery within communities. You can spot them from a distance. Mind you, this is not to say that the best local government representatives make the best parliamentarians, since they are almost entirely separate disciplines.

Now, what am I really fussing about today? It is May 2023 – exactly seven years since the last round of public consultations to consider an evolving menu of options for local government reform.

It was a process that spanned political administrations and included key players such as former ministers Surujrattan Rambachan, Hazel Manning, and the late Franklin Khan.

Significantly, there has been no serious contention over the main requirements of a reformed system. Chief among these was the ability of local government bodies to keep the proceeds of the Property Tax and other revenues in order to maintain stronger financial autonomy. Granted, the Property Tax has taken on a life of its own.

This issue was captured in the 2022 amendments and was a significant feature of the reforms related to the fiscal independence of local government bodies.

Other goals - some of them strongly represented in the amendments, others not - included a higher level of executive authority for the municipalities, a variety of new responsibilities including school maintenance and social services support, an expanded role for better resourced municipal police services, and added responsibility for disaster management.

For these and other objectives identified in the reform process, it will require much more than simple political will or even legislation. It will take the concerted interest of all civil society players to ensure that the goal of more effective, meaningful, governance at the local level is achieved.

All of this in turn will mean that beyond the hustings and the partisan flare-ups that can and will occur, a transition to community self-interest and responsibility, away from arbitrary executive action can become increasingly possible.

I am awaiting the political discourse which captures such possibilities. The Privy Council judgment only hints at it. But there is a quite a lot more to say and do about this.

 

 

Addressing social media and disinformation

 

View my take on the subject here

Confronting plural crises

The theme assigned the upcoming regional meeting of regional labour ministers in Guyana ambitiously focuses on “social justice” during what the International Labour Organization (ILO) proposes to be a discussion on “the foundation for a sustainable Caribbean transformation.”

I am not sure how such fanciful themes are brainstormed and finalised, but it must have been that somebody or bodies spent time on a host of stuffy texts which explore current thinking on notions of equity and justice as fundamental components of the solution to what the framers of the May 23-25 conversation describe as “plural crises” in the Caribbean.

They must have been reading every newspaper there is to read, and followed all the newscasts, social media posts, and the lamentations of writers, musicians, and artists. It would have also been necessary to sift hollow political polemic and sloganeering from lived experience and trauma.

There had to have been a battle against political incumbents who claim, “all is well” (“excellent”) and those who narrate tales of terminal decline - until their turn arrives and all is suddenly well and “excellent”.

There had to have been the backdrop of April’s crime and violence talks and the largely infertile menu of under-developed, whimsical prescriptions depictive of cluelessness of high order … in high places.

Few from among us would contend that “plural crises” is the stuff of hyperbole. That we indeed face a multiplicity of multi-faceted and rapid downhill journeys on carriages fixed to wobbly, decaying, disintegrating wheels.

Those of us who have decided to stay, physically and emotionally, are left with a task way beyond the limits of partisan desire - the alternatives being exile of different degrees and expression.

You can sense an absence of commitment from a distance. There is a willingness to initiate destruction at the onset of defeat. Chronic claims of victimhood as a salve for complicity. Sectional triumphalism and factional defeat when victory becomes elusive. A quick resort to active and passive exile – darts thrown from both safely afar and within the neighbourhood.

Plural crises indeed. Little time to find how we came to this. To trace a lineage of descent. To contemplate the joint enterprise of loss. Instead, a simple resort to blame and hopelessness.

In that light, does the ILO (and, by extension, its Caribbean partners) understand what they are really getting themselves into when they meet in Guyana next week? Perhaps. I have seen that in the concept note for the meeting that last year’s communique from the Caricom Summit is cited with reference to a “whole of government and society approach to recovery and resilience.”

This is a tall order in any context. Of the host country Guyana, for example, Caribbean economist, Marla Dukharan, reported recently: “Guyana is still the world's fastest growing economy, but has the lowest import cover and they are withdrawing as fast as they deposit into their Sovereign Wealth Fund.”

How will this be addressed within the context of a meeting of labour ministers all ostensibly committed to “priority attention to and investment in integrated policies and strategies to create decent jobs, extend social protection and facilitate just transitions”?

Where will T&T’s growing socio-economic divide feature in the discussion on “human-centric” economic recovery and the challenge of labour migration in key sectors? Add to that the role of inward migration in expanding opportunities in our labour market.

Importantly, as well, is the requirement of “just transitions” within the context of inevitable global economic change, and an unfolding climate crisis against which all discussions on Caribbean climate must be nuanced.

It is time national dialogues in our region move more firmly in the direction of these subjects that have a bearing on our future viability. I looked and looked again at what the ILO has in store for Caribbean governments next week and hope we take an appropriate cue with eyes set on issues that reach farther and wider than unstable, chaotic labour markets and interventions to stabilise them.

Our labour ministers in this region are routinely clustered among the least influential of Cabinet members. Quick, name three of them from any three Caricom countries including your own.

True, such meetings are not meant to resolve all the problems of the world. But they play a role in defining the nature and pace of change. Come away with a reinforced status quo, and you have reached nowhere, achieved nothing – whatever the fancy language.