Youth unemployment and social crises

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Among the more tragic outcomes of this pandemic era (and, no, it is not yet over) has been the declining ability by countries all over the world to address the serious challenge of youth unemployment and the productive participation of our young people in society.

The International Labour Organization (ILO) has suggested that young people are at least three times less likely to gain access to meaningful employment than their seniors. At this time of the pandemic, the young have been the most significant victims of shrinking, undermined labour markets.

In most instances this means that among the growing cohort of unemployed you can expect to encounter the under-25s in expanding numbers – particularly young women.

In its 2022 youth employment report, the ILO estimate of youth not engaged in either employment, education or training in the Latin American and Caribbean region is 20.5%.

No one would argue that the Caribbean statistic is likely to be considerably higher given our thin resource bases, high vulnerability to external shocks and weakened resilience in some key sectors. In T&T, the rate was estimated at 9.12% in pre-pandemic 2019.

Bear in mind, the technical folks working on these things assess youth unemployment as the share of the labour force ages 15-24 without work but available for and seeking employment.

Our comparatively low percentage could, in that light, be symptomatic of a severe crisis being manifest in a variety of ways as growing numbers withdraw from contention for jobs.

Increasing the official age of retirement - which is an entirely understandable compulsion given the bunching of state retirement benefits - can also have the impact of keeping older people in positions that could otherwise be made available to the young.

There is much to dampen the prospect of youth employment. But also no shortage of challenges to independent youth entrepreneurship within both the formal and informal sectors.

The pursuit of opportunities in the informal economy (which accounts for 77% of youth employment globally) is frequently discouraged and even punished here.

There is indeed evidence that our informal sector has grown during the pandemic. In many instances, it has met public demand for goods and services more seamlessly than obtained in the past. Business groupings need to make greater efforts to embrace the new initiatives and to provide greater support to bring recognition and legitimacy to them.

Meanwhile, the focus of ILO efforts to generate increased movement from the informal to formal has not been readily embraced by either the state or the network of private institutions assigned implicit responsibility for so doing. The benefits of achieving this are readily expressed in access to social protection mechanisms.

Instead, these most vulnerable subjects of the scourge of brittle labour markets, the young, are routinely and pointedly excluded from participating in those areas that rely on the energy and creativity they bring naturally to the table.

State agencies, banks, insurance companies and others seemingly lie in wait to shatter dreams. Labour unions pay them absolutely no mind and the organised private sector is slow to embrace them. This is quite a formidable alignment of countervailing forces.

To their credit, some of the larger more successful business enterprises have attempted to provide a measure of support, even as a form of enlightened self-interest.

Dismantling mechanisms to promote the required social dialogue, such as the National Tripartite Advisory Council, is thus among the worst things that can happen at this time.

In this respect, our labour unions are drifting into a rapidly moving stream of irrelevance, beyond its undeniable role in the collective bargaining process.

Broader social activism has been abandoned with little input into modern realities that impact on the world of work, social peace, and the interests of the people of tomorrow.

Additionally, while there has been understandable concern by all about our young men, girls and women actually account for a higher proportion of unemployed youth than their male counterparts and face a multiplicity of unique, corresponding risks.

Globally, young men are almost 1.5 times more likely than young women to be employed.

This is one of those times when the macro-economic fundamentals cannot stand on their own. Debt to GDP ratios, rates of (jobless) growth, foreign currency cover and what sits idle and unproductive in the banking kitty mean nothing if the reality signals a crisis of the young.

We are not going to be forgiven for dropping the ball on this one. The costs are too high to contemplate. We are already witnessing some inevitable impacts.

 

Of hope and dystopia

Listen to this here: Wesley Speaks

Every day now we witness the unfolding of what the late Morgan Job contentiously diagnosed as a dystopian destiny - the product of a toxic concoction comprising political depravities, acquired ignorance, and the teetering infrastructure of increasingly impotent social institutions.

Yet all the time, as was the case two decades ago, bastions of resistance emerge as countervailing forces in the form of youth creativity, skill, and achievement. From the very heart of a so-called “failed generation” and “failed race” come the main pillars of substantial hope.

Jereem, Nicholas, our Kids Sooo Amazing, Leandra, Mikhail, Teneka, Adrian, Chantal, Aviel, Duvone, Gerelle, Vaughnette, Johann, Brandon, Justin – a fuller list requiring much more than mere column inches or finite time.

Social and political movements founded on the notion of the chronic failure of others themselves slant toward extinction. It’s not all mystic parable if we countenance the daily decay on the public stage. We know it when we see it. We all know who you are. Laughing emojis jeering tragedy on social media have real and fake names attached.

These days, I have been driving on potholed roads past copper lines hanging as limply as the slothful, impotent official and public responses to them. No time found by some for outright condemnation of such acts or a prescription to address them. We hear the silence.

Little energy left to prosecute except by way of disproportionate vigilante justice – kill them when you can. Or worse, leave them to the quiet consent of those who do not wish us well … at least for now.

Abandon legitimate protest and effective civil disobedience and burn some tyres or destroy public property for good measure. Bust the water pumps, smash the fittings and the lines. Cut the poles and let’s see how they feel. Mash up de place good and proper.

Kill them. Or let them die. No COVID-19, no masks, no vaccines. Monkey pox as “jokey” as they come. “Ventilation” as singular remedy in poor, small, over-crowded spaces. And, by the way, there’s no climate crisis. Flat-earth science versus fact.

After all, whose are the public faces of CARPHA, WHO and PAHO? And why, indeed, should they be ignored in favour of others? Look at them. Look at them. Look at us. Look at us.

“Because, you see, they walk up to each other in broad daylight and shoot each other in the head.” The way, in full public view, hope is torn from the hearts of those who simply need a break.

Just a slither of space to bring flight to fanciful ideas. Not a new car or a home mortgage. Only a fantasy with the promise of financial surplus to take them through as people in their own right. But they’re better off now, they say, than under thatched roofs far away. Still “no head for business.” An inability to convert “sense/cents” into dollars, they say.

Those of us who have chosen to stay and fight, with both feet inside, cannot but believe that through all this there are more than tiny glimmers of hope. This comes from living here and knowing about us and what makes us tick from both sides of the burglar bars.

Had our world been smaller, we would have mistaken all of this for total collapse. Had we not known that from Guayaguayare to Chaguanas to Toco to Speyside there is life and living, and people making things, achieving, hoping, we would have fallen for the myth, expressed as tacit political slogan, of tribal and thus a form of collective failure.

The real risks come when we concede to a conclusion of collapse. How, at that point, can we continue to call here home? But there is no yearning by most of us (who have chosen to remain both physically and emotionally), despite forceful alternative mythologies, for second class citizenship. A relinquishing of sovereignty, ownership, and responsibility.

This is a small space with many wonders. There is also joy we should not allow anyone to take from us. I see the great promise of the young folk. My son’s personal creed is “keep making things.”

I am prepared to embrace these young citizens. They bring us hope.

 

Unanswered Questions

The screening of The Challengers by the UNHCR at the IMAX facility in POS last week offered as much from the film itself as did the actual hosting of the event.

As is often the case at such events, the unspoken is as important as what is said and absentees as noteworthy as those who turn up.

Estimated that way, the entire experience is capable of vastly exceeding the sum of the parts of such an occasion.

So, we can virtually reflect on the screening without necessarily reviewing the nuts and bolts of a 20-minute film.

It was a production comprising modest filmic values but containing enormously important personal insights into one of the more critical issues of the day – this country’s awkward embrace of its obligations as a member of the global community, and some of the tragic outcomes of our failure to satisfactorily do so.

The Challengers is thus rich with opportunity as a tutorial on challenge, opportunity, and success and as a guide to some of the key features of the migrant story in T&T.

Here is a production that in 1,200 seconds introduces the myriad elements of an issue being confronted the world over - in as many different ways as there are countries involved. You see, nobody seems to have got this entirely right.

This is also difficult diplomatic terrain for an agency such as the UN Refugee Agency, for whom the use of words and phrases can serve as triggers for intemperance and ignorance  – “migrants”, “asylum seekers” and “refugees” consequentially stretched to the cautious limits of technical correctness.

True, the event could have ended on the point of a cohesive Venezuelan volleyball team, but the organisers sensed the need for more. And here is where things got even more interesting.

For example, the lead story by any journalist could have come from when UNHCR National Office Head Miriam Aertker asked why the children of Venezuelan immigrants weren’t accommodated at our schools. In vain, I scanned the crowd for a designated plant from the ministry of education, or any related agency, for a response/excuse/explanation.

Yet, the denial of the right to an education for children is an acknowledged responsibility of every single state on the planet. Our country has boasted of a commitment to achieve the goals of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child while wilfully ignoring Article 28 which explicitly calls for compliance “no matter who they are.”

The “close the borders” crew who were either not invited (though they should have been) or chose to be absent ought to have been there to offer an opinion or answer. Their main political sponsors also appeared to have been absent.

As one of the stories of the day, there is also the headline regarding legal status – somewhat settled by an enlightened but deficient “registration” process in 2019 that effectively imposed a pragmatic cap on inflows - not tidily accommodated under international law but viewed in some places as a sensible thing to do.

There is indeed a case to be made for small, resource-scarce spaces such as ours. But this has to be nuanced against humanitarian obligations at law and through conscience. I had hoped for a response to that elephant in the room, but there was no one there to substantially do so. Where was the ministry of national security?

Is it that such a question is asked and answered in discreet spaces? I do not know. But not at last week’s screening.

There is, as well, the discomfort of having to address a problem involving neighbours who also happen to be friends. They beat their spouses every day and hang dirty underwear out the window facing you.

But “good morning” and “good evening” are what good neighbours do … and there’s also the question of an overhanging mango tree.

So, this is no easy transaction – though you need to call the police on them for the beatings and find a way to attend to the underwear question without jeopardising the opportunities mango season brings.

I listened to the minister of foreign and Caricom affairs being interviewed on Sunday. He sounds like the informed, polite neighbour who can pull this off. Yet, I looked for him last week and he wasn’t there.

People cannot be everywhere at every time, but this is one of the stories of our time and filmmaker, Rhonda Chan Soo, found ways to creatively ask all the pertinent questions. Too many remain unanswered because there were those who chose not to be there. What a shame.

 

 

 

Our Brittle Spaces

It was April 2001, and the first time Montserrat was going to try for a “single-constituency” election following the devastation of successive volcanic eruptions.

Four of the previous seven electoral constituencies no longer existed as viable spaces for human occupation, so nine House of Assembly seats were being contested in a single constituency system in the service of a population of 4,000.

On the helicopter ride over (the airport had been destroyed and we landed in an open space up north), I sat next to the venerable Howard Fergus (historian, poet, educator, Caribbean hero). Part of the conversation went like this: “So, do you plan to use voters’ ink to tell who voted and who has not?”

“This is not Trinidad, you know,” came the stern and immediate response. I looked out the window and tried hard not to laugh out loud.

By December that very year, 2001, following the dramatic collapse of the UNC in office, we experienced the 18-18 parliamentary split and the ensuing intrigues.

I had been to Montserrat before, on the heels of the devastating eruptions of 1996 and 1997. The latter episode brought death and unbelievable destruction.

I refer to the victims of 1997 almost every time I speak on the climate crisis (no, volcanic eruptions are not the result of climate change) due to our tendency as island folk to consider the presumed benevolence of the natural environment.

In 1996, one farmer had pointed to an open field and asked words to the effect: “Where else do you want me to go? I was born here. My home is here. The animals you see out there are mine. God won’t allow anything to happen to us.”

When I returned a year later, I asked about some of the people I had met and was told that this particular farmer had perished in 1997.

In 1998, I made it to the Montserrat Volcanic Observatory where I met with the lead scientist there at the time, one Dr Keith Rowley. I asked a completely inappropriate question about “adventure tourism” and was told in a sharp response: “That’s not advisable at the moment. We are still dealing with an active volcano.” (Yes, he has had practice in all this).

On July 27, 2022, all of this can help us come to terms with the brittleness of our circumstances. There have been the murders of 32 years ago that have been increasingly cloaked in mythologies rooted mainly in political preference.

There have been those who assigned to the killers noble cause, and to opportunistic looters and arsonists a flavour of grand design.

Raoul Pantin insisted, down to the very end, that the “active volcano” of 1990 helped provide a cover of validity to criminal intent and sparked the inferno of the organised violence we are currently experiencing.

The brittle public security “infrastructure” of the past, whatever the hubris and bluster of recent years, remains principally the same (look at how Monday’s fiery protests in Maraval unfolded seamlessly).

There also remain those who have either romanticised the criminality of 1990 or silently embraced it. I have tried to follow the public trail closely. Kept the Hansards. Read the papers. I see the posts on social media. I was there that day, you see. On the ground, dodging bullets.

There have since been paths to development we dared not fully engage in the face of eruptive violence in behaviour and in the rowdy debates we have been convening. The pursuit of national aspirations is increasingly reduced to crass, vulgar quarrels in the public space.

What, you might ask, does this have to do with Montserrat 1996 and 1997? I would suggest, almost everything.

There are the inherent natural and manmade vulnerabilities. A requirement to tailor and equip national institutions to attend to new realities – the “single constituency” as metaphor for the management of tribal loyalties.

The need for a full reality check regarding the prospects for emerging out of current crises intact. Recognition of small size as both asset and liability. The emergence of an honest civil discourse not led by charlatans and bigots or rooted in the belief of a failed race.

This would considerably clear the deck of this listing ship. Help us count, at least on the fingers of our hands, those people and things that can help keep us safe in the face of the oncoming pyroclastic flows. There are clouds of steam above the peak.

* Listen to it here: Wesley Speaks

 

Out of order

At the height of the pandemic lockdown, I bought a turntable to both play and to digitise old vinyl records that lay languishing in boxes in my cupboard.

Sadly, while the experience brought much joy, it also reminded me why some of us still describe mostly irritating, repetitive admonitions as being akin to experiencing a “stuck record.”

My digital native musician son had, of course, known the idiom, but acquired first-hand knowledge of it while we played the Mighty Shadow’s ‘Keep On Dancin’ – gifted to my late father by the calypso genius himself in 1991 but which was not very well preserved.

Being like a “stuck record” signals a defect – accumulated dust or grime or, worse, a terminal crack or scratch. Used as an extended metaphor, though, it can point to the necessity of repeated mention of a recurring offensive/negative act or condition.

All of this is to blunt retorts to my insistence on reminding people that the digital era has long been upon us. And even as a child of the analogue generation, I am committed to the unprecedented advantages of the current period, despite our seemingly collective refusal to grasp them.

Almost every week I have been finding space to mention, either in passing or substantively, that our country is missing the point of all of this and as a consequence the situation remains, in important areas of private and public life, chronically damaged, unfixed, or simply “out of order.”

For instance, it did not appear to bother many that for more than a week, the government’s ttconnect service, “the easy road to access info on All Government Services” remained, without explanation or apology, “out of order.”

Some smarty-pants is going to suggest that only “some” services were unavailable, and that it was still possible to stand in line under cloudy skies on the street to transact business with slothful government agencies.

Well, why the fuss? Among the key functions of the service, is to make life easier for people interested in conducting their tax affairs online while optimising the prospects for more efficient collection of taxes … which fuel the economy and keep things rolling by also paying the people responsible for keeping ttconnect functional!

Monday’s delayed apology from ttconnect included typically vague tech gobbledygook that’s, at minimum, disrespectful to those even with half-knowledge of how these things work. “Be assured, our technical teams have been working tirelessly to restore the portal’s accessibility and the NORMALNESS it provides.”

There was no indication of resolution time, or what precisely this “normalness” means. People who know about such stuff would tell you that for something as important as this, durable redundancies and rigorous implementation plans are expected to be par for the course.

As appalling as it is, this is not a unique or narrow national experience. There appears to be a high level of cognitive dissonance each time both public and private sector bosses are called upon to employ digital solutions to make life easier for clients/citizens. It calls for enlightened recognition of both processes and outcomes.

Digital vaccine cards were conceived, bungled and expired in one seamless flight of fancy spanning months and months.

Meanwhile, glitzy digital entry points almost routinely lead to bureaucratic mazes occupied by paper, signatures, office visits, more paper, parking spaces, frustration, “photocopies available across the street”, “download, print, sign, scan and email.”

The digital facades are everywhere in the private sector too. Now that strict pandemic measures are being lifted, processes that furtively approached digital terrain are now retreating to the “normalness” we appear to love.

Where, in banking, insurance, retail is there real evidence of a commitment to embrace digital opportunity following a period when it remained, in many instances, the sole path?

Many chosen options at that time now lie haplessly “out of order.” In a society where so many things are in need of repair and so much is left undone or incomplete, this is an irresistible descriptor of our resistance to the tools of modernity.

Moving from “Driver’s Permit” to “Driver’s Licence”, for example, is not among even the least evident indications of digitally driven change. That it can be shamelessly promoted as such by a government ministry for which “out of order” is the norm speaks volumes.

Absolutely no apologies, therefore, for being a stuck record on this. Or am I being out of order?

Caricom’s crisis governance

With all due respect to everyone concerned, including the UN and Caricom SGs, I paid close attention to just three speakers at Sunday's torturously long opening ceremony of Caricom Heads of Government Meeting in Suriname – John Briceño of Belize, Chan Santokhi of Suriname, and Dickon Mitchell of Grenada.

Briceño, as outgoing chairman during an unprecedented period of turmoil. Santokhi as incoming chairman - and, like Briceño, from an “outlier” continental member state not umbilically tied to UWI or hooked on cricket. While Mitchell, a UWI graduate, was the new kid on the block.

Fresh from his baptism as chairman of the regional grouping, Briceño was worth a listen as he manoeuvred his hand out of the mouth of a hungry Caricom lion in handing over to Santokhi.

It is however advisable that public servants permit more extemporaneous expression by the politicians at such events – just as they are during cantankerous leaders’ caucuses tightly guarded from public view.

Because of all this, the Belizean leader was big on platitudes and effusive with the painfully well-known and obvious, while granting himself a single profound line around which the entire agenda could have been designed.

“Crisis governance,” he said, “is the new normal.” This, indeed, had to be the unspoken, overarching theme for a meeting of leaders for whom, as it has always been, everything remains a priority.

That’s why the failure of a longstanding commitment to rationalise over-packed agendas. But in the end, it always comes down to management of a series of simultaneous developmental crises.

Even when there appeared to have been some space, along came a pandemic, sharp economic decline in most states, and now, fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

So, yes, the rest of Briceño’s address outlines the well-known challenges. But the “crisis governance” punchline actually comes near the start. He could have ended there.

Of course, and to be clear, at both national and regional levels, when have states of crisis not framed our experience? When has EVERYTHING not been a priority? It is a dynamic that predates even the advent of independence 60 years ago.

When it came to Mitchell, it would have been preferable to have let him loose on his own – fresh from the hustings with all the passion and fury that accompany newness.

Instead, there was full restatement of the endless priorities – regional transportation, food, the climate crisis, the pandemic and his country’s assigned portfolio of science and technology. The copy of the speech I received awaited the words of a senior public servant on the latter, hugely important, subject.

There ought to have been a case, made up front by him, that his regional assignment lies at the core of the responses to concurrent crises. He must know it is an area that exceeds the confines of the “science and technology” craved by technocratic originators of the portfolio. This enters terrain he, as an under-60, should understand as mindset.

We needed to hear him say he will be among those to lead a revolution. Maybe he will come to that. But on Sunday, such a message was not woven into a bureaucratic regurgitation of current realities.

Then came Santokhi – in many ways a well-timed ascendant to Caricom chairmanship – an emerging oil boom, mainland location, diverse population, acquaintance with recurring tumult, and a safe distance away from most traditional Caricom fancies.

Note the discomfort of the Surinamese reader of the citation on behalf of Viv Richards OCC. It could have been the same in Belize, Haiti, and even The Bahamas where a preoccupation with “the good old days” of West Indies cricket is barely understood.

Santokhi had a thinly disguised message for this cricket-playing neighbour: “Offshore oil and gas is new for Suriname and Guyana,” he said.

“I welcome my Caribbean sisters and brothers, to benefit from our resources and invite them to invest and contribute as contractors and sub-contractors,

“All you have to do is register your business at our Chamber of Commerce and partner with a Surinamese company to become a local content (sic).”

His trusted foreign minister is former ASG at both Caricom and the OAS, Albert Ramdin, who has also been pinch-hitting on his behalf on several domestic issues and knows the Caribbean well. His hand is easily recognisable.

Santokhi’s turn at the helm promises to be as torrid as Briceño’s initiation. He will need all the support that’s available. His “local content” remark is quite an opener and supports his recognition of a joint Caricom enterprise to address emerging challenges.

His speech was worth the wait.

Postscript: Congratulations to all OCC awardees. But special mention here of David Rudder – a T&T and Caribbean treasure whose rallying call transcends the boundaries of mere cricket.

The perils of pessimism

Part 1

Today’s headline has been borrowed from a Foreign Affairs magazine article published last week. In it, Daniel W. Drezner examined shifting poles of global power and influence and explored grounds for hope - presumably by all concerned – in the face of general gloom.

And though I propose to explore far more parochial concerns, I thought Drezner’s headline and essential arguments contained sufficient guidance for a nuanced examination of the prospects for our Caribbean region.

The first has to do with our awkward engagement of prevailing global realities. More accomplished voices on this issue are not often heard, resident as they are on the outer margins of our news agendas. So, some of the rest of us are compelled to weigh in.

The fact is, we have nowhere to go as solitary small states subject to the turbulent vagaries of natural, historical, and geo-political challenges to sustainability and survivability.

Jamaica just learned this lesson at the Commonwealth. All of us also looked on at the diplomatic flaccidity that followed prior vigour ahead of the LA Summit of the Americas.

Count on the indomitable Antigua and Barbuda diplomat Ron Sanders, though, to find shine on the other side of the cricket ball.

Even more than being “worth attending” (as his recent column on the SOA concluded) Sanders argues that the personal attention of President Biden to “candid, hard truths” jointly expressed by Caribbean leaders, provided grounds for positivity and optimism. Herein, a lesson in collective endeavour.

This segues roughly into a seemingly unrelated point I really need to make, but which fits the requirements of today’s headline.

Part 2

Much of our pessimism – and there is no denying that there is – resides in the fact of ill-equipped leadership in almost all sectors - the private sector, civil society, and glaringly in politics.

Fact: There is no substantial qualitative difference between the private and public sectors, in most of our countries, when it comes to the requirements of digital transformation and the guidance to take us there.

People are still lining up in sun and rain, having multiple visits to the same offices, being refused service in the absence of paper, and deprived of access to routine services because digital natives, and the mindsets they bring, are being denied their rightful leadership positions.

Resistance to pessimism succeeds whenever we consider the presence of a generation of innovators and thinkers who currently thrive in their own small spaces right here in the Caribbean. If you believe there is a “lost generation” of young people, you are being wilfully blind.

Part 3

The politics have evoked conflicting emotions on this question. More appropriately identified as elections and special events machineries, most of the region’s political parties are otherwise functionally moribund.

There is little, if any, systematic political education, no succession planning, and a philosophical pragmatism rooted in an absence of belief in and commitment to anything.

That some elders now consider themselves worthy of reactivation to assist equally signals their own past failures as it does a sense of contemporary hopelessness.

Even so, this is no cause to yield to dark pessimism. I looked at the recent election in Grenada (the runup to which was unpardonably ignored by too many of us in the media) and the emergence of 44-year-old Dickon Mitchell. He reminded me, during the brisk campaign, of our own Farley Augustine (36) – young, precocious, and bright.

I thought of the emergence of the other under-60s – Mia Mottley (57), Andrew Holness (49), Irfaan Ali (42), Roosevelt Skerritt (50), and Timothy Harris (58).

Whatever their current popularity/predicaments – Harris is barely clinging to office, Holness is embattled, and Skerritt is already into a fourth consecutive term – there are benefits to be derived from the fact that they were all born after the first wave of independence movements in the Caribbean.

By sharp contrast, the septuagenarians of T&T, St Vincent and the Grenadines, and up to last week, Grenada, need to understand that there must come a time when they decide to step aside.

Of course, it’s not just a matter of age. But vintage is a double-edged sword. The political scientists should spend a lot less time sneakily picking sides and explain this to us.

There is a pessimism that’s setting in that has, as a main component, the growing irrelevance of our political leadership.

In each of the three scenarios, there is the peril of pessimism. Hope only emerges when we honestly confront them.