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BLP Column:Thompson at sea
7/31/2009
Opposition Leader Mia Amor Mottley said it best, David Thompson is hopelessly out of his depth. There was an alarming sense of déjà vu watching the Prime Minister on television on Tuesday night. All the old memories of his first failure as Minister of Finance came flooding back with nauseating accuracy.
It is as if the Prime Minister is stuck in a time warp. He just cannot seem to wrap his head around the fact that the old orthodox economic theories will not turn our economy around. They did not work in the 1990s and they are not working now.
Instead of meeting the problems of the economy head on, he is in retreat. He admits that Barbados is well placed to borrow, but insists that he is anti borrowing. This is a remarkable mindset for a Minister of Finance who has increased the national debt by over $1 billion after a year-and-a-half in office. His announcement of an $80 million drawdown from our Special Drawing Rights at the IMF is the tip of the iceberg. Countries will usually draw down their paid up capital when they have no other options and as a last step before entering an IMF programme.
All of this is symptomatic of his piecemeal approach to economic management since this year’s Budget. It is as if he thinks that by doling out the bad news in small doses that it will be more palatable. His failure to buy into the need to spend our way out of the recession will mean a longer
recovery period with even more job losses.
Unfortunately, he applies this same approach to solutions as well, eking out inadequate amounts of cash for the small hotel sector and marketing
support that have had very little effect on the dwindling foreign exchange earnings of the tourism sector.
What the country needs is a new Minister of Tourism, who understands the dynamics of the industry and who can react in a timely manner to insufficient airlift and declining long-stay arrivals, and who is cognisant of what the competition is doing to stay ahead of us. Tourism is too important to the lives of too many to leave it in Richard Sealy’s hands any longer.
Having failed to attract the much-touted Cost You Less to our shores, the Prime Minister is taking us back to the old 70’s model of putting Government in the retail business, fraught as it is with the risk of losses, abuse and the real possibility that the service will fail to reach the people who need it most, because he thinks this will gain him some popularity among Barbadians to whom he promised to reduce the cost of living. Those who will be impacted the most are those still with jobs in the retail sector, many of whom are already having sleepless nights.
Everyone knows about Constituency Councils, free summer camps and free bus rides, but how many Barbadians can name three things the Prime Minister has done to stabilise or stimulate the economy. The results of his efforts are there for everyone to see – two consecutive quarters of negative growth, job losses, higher national debt, declining foreign reserves, shrinking direct foreign investment and the expectation that the economy will decline by a further three per cent by year-end.
His sorry attempts to attack and blame the Opposition for his own failures no longer sit well with Barbadians.
And Hartley Henry would do well to explain to Barbadians what our Prime Minister was doing in St. Kitts a couple of weekends ago. At least they will appreciate that Mia Mottley was there in her professional capacity as an attorney-at-law, which she is entitled to do. He is now in charge of the country and ought to be focusing all of his energies on turning the economy around. He is the one that ought to be spending more time at his desk. Enough said.
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