Barbados In Deep Financial Crisis

                                            The Caribbean Is One Nation.
                                                                 Barbados In Deep Financial Crisis

by William Skinner

Barbados National Flag

 I am fully aware that the decision to get rid of over 3000 civil servants will be met with great applause by those citizens who for decades have believed that our civil servants are not up to scratch with their service to the public. It is a position that I do not share personally. I am also aware that those calling for privatization will now feel they were justified. In my humble opinion, that is nothing more than bunkum because our economy is already heavily privatized and we are still in the debt trap.

Many crocodile tears will be shed by the same frauds , who shed tears over the imposition of tuition fees on the poor, mainly black students at Cave Hill, University of the West Indies. These are the same political charlatans who would abolish free bus fares for school children, who were missing school because their parents had no money. They are the same ones who are now trying to convince us that domestic violence is only found among the poor and poorly educated. It follows a pattern that whenever there is a problem within the society , they zoom in on the poor.

The simple truth is that the economy has been in need of desperate restructuring for at least since the mid seventies. The BLP/DLP government has failed at every given opportunity to reform or restructure the economy .We have a system of sophisticated political largesse that caters to  the now emerged upper middle class political managers ,who have taken friendship and social contacts, to a level of sycophancy ,that we have never before witnessed in our island state!

In the mean time, we have deemed poor and economically challenged citizens as the yard fowls and we engage in poking fun at them because it gives us some sadistic pleasure in ridiculing poor black people. Sometimes I ask myself if there is not one single white yard fowl among 280,000 people ! We have a BLP/DLP collective that has gotten very little right since independence: housing, roads, the Q.E. H, agriculture, fisheries, water works and a multiplicity of social services  have all suffered under inept and visionless so –called leadership coming primarily from within the legal profession.

Even as this current BLP/DLP administration flounders about the place; we still have apologists who are actually convinced that some good will come from George or Roebuck Streets. They are either blind to the reality of our condition or they have voluntarily imbibed a dangerous concoction of BLP/DLP cool aid laced with amnesia and unconditional love.

As we approach fifty years of independence, it is high time that progressive thinkers/citizens go after both the essentially black political managerial class and call to account the dominant white corporate elites and demand that they treat us with some respect.  It can no longer be business as usual. The over 3000 civil servants who have now been financially slaughtered by the BLP/DLP, did not bring our island state’s economy to its knees. Quite the opposite because if we did not have a superb public service and if our island state was left totally in the hands of the thirty jokers we have knocking around Parliament, we would have all been in the graveyard ever since.

In any serious democracy, where accountability matters, Mr. Sinkler would be in the ranks of the unemployed since he has failed to even begin to institute any real economic policy; we would be going back to the polls to allow the people to determine if there was indeed a “betrayal”. And perhaps then, we would see the wisdom in electing a real national government as recently stated by Dr. Neville Duncan,(Barbados Today 12/16/13) who had the decency to say that in his considerable estimation, that what is happening would have also happened under the BLP. It has been  my long held contention that we Barbadians have the worst kind of one party state- a one party state that we actually think is two parties. Like we all drinking the BLP/DLP cool aid laced with amnesia and unconditional love.

William Skinner is a commentator on Caribbean Current Affairs.