Inferiority Complex, Our Obstacle

26, Jul 1999
After visiting Point Lisas on his last visit to T&T prior to the recent Caricom Summit, the Honourable Prime Minister of St Lucia, Mr Kenny Anthony, confessed that the extent and depth of T&T's industrial development seemed to be a well-kept secret.

It appears to be a secret to a large number of born and bred Trinidadians and Tobagonians for listening to many one would assume that T&T was only now arising out of the stone age. Most times it is the eye of the stranger that makes the difference, brings the reality to blinkered vision and/or forces many to see anew all that has been taken for granted.

Development is a highly concentrated social phenomenon that brings to the fore the polarisation of extremes, areas of plenty juxtaposed sharply with areas of want and scarcity, areas of untold modern amenities side by side with areas of dire destitution.

So-called developed countries in a lot of instances are comprised of cloistered cities with absolutely nothing in-between. Between Montreal and Toronto there are many places more dead than Toco and Sans Souci.

If you ever were to enter Kenora and Vermillion Bay near the border between Ontario and Manitoba you will come to understand what is meant by the term "one-horse town".

In the USA, Waycross, Georgia, is no different. On seeing such places would you conclude that Canada and USA are "undeveloped" or "underdeveloped" because of such outposts? Obviously not!

The point is that "developed" and "undeveloped" are relative terms. One US visitor after walking downtown Port-of-Spain remarked to us that the only difference between our main shopping area and Madison Avenue was a question of scale.

Development is not only about the build-up of infrastructure and accumulation at concentrated points, but also about the relationship and connectivity between such points and their abject opposites.

You ever wonder why most people will tend to seek the outback and wilderness to reflect and recharge themselves when on vacation? Yet after only a mere 37 years of political independence, we continue to paint such negative pictures of T&T and ourselves to the extent that one of our neighbours, Mr Kenny Anthony, was forced to express utter surprise at what he saw here. And when Mr Anthony there and then called on our Prime Minister to provide the necessary leadership to the rest of the Caribbean, Mr Panday in turn confessed not to know what to make of Mr Anthony's request.

What is the reality? Despite our economic dependency, we have sought over the years to establish the required infrastructure that would position us in a certain light before the world. There have been huge obstacles placed in our way but none as big as our own blindness, cultural ineptitude and failings and psychological complexes. We simply do not trust ourselves.

A lot of what has been established over the years has, in fact, been slaughtered by our own disregard for coherency, process, maintenance and implementation. Our early five-year development programmes were geared to promote import-substitution, create new manufacturing capacity, diversify industrial activity away from the stranglehold of the old traditional relationships, typical of direct foreign investment and the one-crop/one-mineral mono-culture dependency.

The underlying logic thereby was informed by the need to forge linkages between our sectors of economic activity to eventually create a fully integrated domestic market in context, of course, of the Caribbean region. The establishment of institutions such as the IDC, DFC, EDC, SBDC, the Central Bank, the localisation of commercial banking, etc together with certain fiscal measures posited the logic that was supposed to guarantee the development envisaged from multiplied levels of local savings and investment.

Coupled with this, our educational thrust was geared to increase tenfold our management and technical capabilities to feed into and drive the very programmes mentioned. Comprehensive schooling was supposed to augment the old grammar schooling and provide the all-around citizen required.

St George's College in Barataria was supposed to be the comprehensive experiment and model but even that was messed up as we allowed the colonial grammar school concept to predominate at all levels of the secondary system which by the '70s could provide nothing but a dysfunctional process of education that churns out regurgitators without purpose rather than creative thinkers and doers seized with native intelligence and will power.

All the ingredients, the infrastructural forms, are there but without the content, the theoretical framework, the conception, to make them work right, together, and with focused coherency, the result being that everything works at cross-purposes.

But we cannot stop the struggle to surmount our own internal demons, our fossilised thought patterns. We have to fight with the institutions that we have founded and massage and fashion them into what is required to make the difference.

One of the major dysfunctions of our dependent economy is that savings tend to be eaten up by direct consumption of durables, goods and services rather than capital investments (ie productive consumption) from which greater levels of accumulation can be derived for further and future development.

A key institution essential to the marshalling of savings for capital investments is the Export-Import Bank (Exim). How many people are aware of this institution? Not many. It was set up in 1974 as Excico Export Credit Insurance Company Ltd and in 1997 was renamed Export-Import Bank of T&T Limited (Eximbank).

Eximbank is a kind of one-stop shop that, besides financing the manufacturing and processing of export orders, acts as a guarantor and insurer, ie provide insurance, for exporters and is a major player in creating foreign exchange savings.

All over the world such banks have provided big exporting countries, eg USA, Japan, Asian Tigers, etc, with the cutting edge needed in the volatile international market place. We have had it for 25 years and it is still under-capitalised and hamstrung by traditional bureaucratic blindness.

Recently both St Lucia and Curacao called on our expertise at the Eximbank to provide guidelines to them for the setting up of similar institutions. We must pay homage to that.

The point is that we must at all levels seek to "re-tool" our minds and set our divergent thinkers free to challenge the world at every point. We must come to accept and have faith that no task is beyond us. If we build the Eximbank as a model for the Caribbean region, maybe, in the course of that, we may come to know what to make of Mr Anthony's request and take the responsibility seriously.

brenco@tstt.net.tt