A GUY'S VIEW: Black Monday – a country in reverse

Monday, November 18, 2019 was a dark day in Barbados and the history of Barbados. That day provided evidence of what Barbadians have been saying in recent months: our country is in reverse.
It was on that date that the Government of Barbados padlocked the property of a Barbadian businesswoman and brought her operation to an end, a few days before the Christmas shopping period on which all retail businesses depend.

Mrs. Ram Mirchandani has catered to the poor working-class Barbadian for many years. Shutting down her business does not affect the well-to-do among us. To shut her down in November amounts to a cruel cut to the poor who were looking forward to her offerings for their Christmas celebrations. It also drives a dagger into the hearts of the persons she employed, as well as the other small businesses that depended on her supplies.

The Government compulsorily acquired the property in question, but at the time of kicking out the owners, had not paid any compensation, according to the owners of the property. Without doubt, the Government has the authority to compulsorily acquire land for public purposes, but this cannot be legally done without the payment of compensation.

It seems that there was an issue of what compensation was adequate. I am not privy to what was asked and offered. What I can say is that in the case of the acquisition of a business which is a going concern, the value cannot be limited to the value of the real estate. How the owners of the business value their future loss of business and their good will is a matter for their accountants.

What should be of major concern for all Barbadians is the willingness of a Government to take up a citizen’s property for the purpose of handing it over to a private investor. If this is indeed what has happened at Bay Street, this country has turned a dangerous corner. This would provide a perilous stretch of the definition of public purpose. This takes us back to the days when what was good for Massa was good for the slave.

These events should alert all Barbadians that if certain people pass by and see their property and like it, they may be in a position to have it acquired for a public purpose and handed over to the viewer for their personal use. The door has been opened. The precedent has been set. Barbados has just been set back 100 years.

There is a difference between a country having written laws and the rule of law. When statutes are manipulated to suit the ends of a privileged few, law does not rule.

The rule of law is more than statutes. One needs to look at what was the intention of Parliament when it legislated. Legislation like the Land Acquisition Act was not designed to rob people of their property.

Given the historical land ownership of Barbados, it was recognised that there was a definite need for the state to take unto itself the power to acquire some lands for the benefit of the wider public interest. This need was recognised long before this country was independent of Britain, this Act having been passed in 1949.

The compensation arrangement built into the Act was not to respect the Constitutional protection of property rights, as that Act pre-existed the Constitution. It was in recognition of the rights of private property owners, which concept later found Constitutional protection.

No one to whom I spoke could remember a time when the Government took land from a citizen to pass to another citizen. Land sales and purchases are private contracts between persons who negotiate their arrangements. If A makes an offer to purchase land from B, but they cannot agree on the price, there is no contract and thus, no sale. It is wrong for the Government to intervene and compulsorily acquire A’s land and give it to B. If there is nothing wrong with this, we might as well be living in the jungle.

But karma is a female dog. As if to show its disapproval of the darkness that descended on Barbados last Monday, the power supply of the entire country failed in spectacular fashion. For the first time in a long while, most of Barbados was without electricity for more than 12 hours. And with the electricity went the water supply, the telephone services, business operations, school attendance; and came chaos.

In 2019, the electricity supply in Barbados is as bad and unreliable as it had been in the 1960s. Whatever the reason for this poor service, there is no doubt that it is having a deleterious effect on this country.

When the Barbados Light and Power was locally owned, the receivers of the service it provided lived here. There was, therefore, a built-in interest in ensuring that its performance was optimal. The crappy service we receive now has no direct effect on the Canadian owners. Maybe we should think again before we sell off our essential services.

While the people of this country suffer, people are making sport at our plight. One can find no other assessment of the joke that the power failure of November 18, 2019 was due to the policies of the last administration that left office on May 24, 2018. Just imagine it: a monopolistic national supplier of electricity had a request for a business initiative turned down 3 years ago, so they decided that they will not upgrade their equipment. And they have the gumption to posit that nonsense as the reason for causing the shutdown of an entire country. If that is true, they were either negligent with respect to the service they provide to this country, or malicious. It is obvious and foreseeable that old, poorly maintained equipment will break down. Some people in this place need to be tarred and feathered. Maybe the fact that we allow them to continue to insult our intelligence gives them the temerity to add insult to our injury.

We have sat back and allowed our telephone service to be linked to our electrical supply, so that when the electricity goes off, we cannot use our telephones. This technology may have been borrowed from jurisdictions with a reliable electricity supply. That description no longer applies to Barbados. Imagine my predicament at 75 years old, living alone, with no electricity, no water, no telephone. God help us.

Persons had to leave home to go to a bus stop to use the solar power to charge their cellular phones. Prior to Monday, I never even knew that that was possible.

We need to take a good look at this country. People are again fetching water in buckets or whatever else they have that can hold this precious commodity, but paying exorbitant water bills. We are again bathing in a bucket of water, in 2019.

This country is moving backwards in almost every respect, except corruption. And we playing political games while the city burns. Tek yuh time.