Where is the vision after 38 years?

04 Sept, 2000
ANOTHER Independence anniversary, another Budget, and still we are none the wiser. Our founding father, so to speak, told us back in 1962 we were a society but not a nation.

Was the key to being a nation responsible self-government? Hostile groups thrown together by fate, finally becoming a cohesive whole with a mandate for modern development? Could there be nationhood without proper rites of passage for every man, woman and child? Could there be discussion without an unravelling?

Frantz Fanon, Caribbean intellect who fought for the liberation of Algeria, warned us about the "pitfalls of national consciousness", confined as it were to a mere sense of geography, ethnicity and external trappings of flags, emblems, symbols and anthems; but devoid of genuine human transformation. The process must start, and end, with the people as the prime focus.

Last year, in this space, it was pointed out that, according to Tom Paine, "man did not enter into society to become worse than he was before, nor to have fewer rights than he had before, but to have those rights better secured. His natural rights are the foundation of all his civil rights.

"He therefore deposits his rights in the common stock of society of which he is part, in preference and in addition to his own. Society grants him nothing.

"Every man is proprietor in society, and draws on the capital as a matter of right... Society and government are not only different, they have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness.

"The former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affection, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages discourse, the other creates distinction. The first is a patron, the last a punisher..."

How much government is required is dependent on how much we prove to be truly men and women, and how much we cease to be desperate and disparate isolated elements; how much we prove capable of not bending down and over for anything and anyone, the faggot syndrome according to LeRoy Clarke.

The greatest and most just laws are the laws of nature. If we can see our way to live by these natural laws of justice, given the fact we are first and foremost social animals, the less government shall have to act as an imposition and the more it shall function as a co-ordinator of our affairs - beholden to no one group or person, but to the community as a social whole.

The point to be made on this, our 38th independence anniversary, is that independence is not only about independence from direct foreign political control, but more so freedom from control from any body or group or structure above and beyond the people united in purpose and focus in their communities of bonded interests.

It is also about freedom from individual mavericks and megalomaniacs. When we wave the flag of independence, it must not be for vulgar individualism but for community self-activity. At this 38th independence anniversary, the 2000-2001 Budget was read. Ironically, it stated no vision of tomorrow.

How could we not be mindful of a sense of moment? Is it that we dream of nothing? What is a human being who is devoid of imagination, the prime gift from God? It is time we cease this mere grocery-listing of fiscal and non-fiscal measures, this mere forecasting of revenues and expenditure that is never a part of the core-essentials of where we dream to go and what we plan to create.

We continue apace with the plantation relationships of producing for export in order to earn foreign exchange, to be quickly consumed in financing importation of capital goods and services earmarked in particular for the very export-oriented industries. In this structural ambit there can be no trickle down.

This is why the masses do not feel or gain from the much-touted annual economic growth rate. Neither can there be any real diversification, for what we get is just a plethora of new sectoral plantations. The gas industry today is just that.

We must seek, as a second stage to our development strategy, to build a domestic, integrated home economy which has its own reason to be. The aim must be to turn Caribbean reality right side up for the first time in our 500 years of history. The State must set the agenda with a clear industrial policy that sends the right signals.

Everything we do from now onwards, whether it is divesting state-owned equity or utilising proceeds from gas and oil bonanzas, the purpose and focus must be to get the interlinked home economy to gradually supersede the plantation economy. When we get to doing that on a Caribbean regional scale - in an expanding market of over 40 million - then, at last, we shall be home free!