NOW AS WELL AS THEN: Where are we 50 years on?

LET it be clear: I love this country of mine. I am not harking back to colonial times. Nor do I favour a large statue of Nelson being in the middle of Heroes Square. Like the Confederate monuments in the USA, the statue had more to do with intimidating Blacks than with celebrating any aspect of our history. Nelson had nothing to do with protecting Barbados. The French were interested in the neighbouring islands like St. Lucia and Dominica! It was undoubtedly important for the Bajan slave owners to celebrate an English hero who fought for the retention of slavery. The contemporary argument that the English come here to see the statue is arrant nonsense. They come here for the three S’s and occasionally for the fourth. They also come here for cricket, and not even our becoming a Republic would stop that influx and that attack on our beer.

Back to us. Fifty years ago we were more industrious and hard working. People did not have jobs, as they describe employment now: they worked! Young men in particular did not become gun-slinging murderers and young privileged children did not become addicts of their newly acquired technology. We did not have to import Guyanese to build our houses. Bajans did that with great aplomb. Each backyard flourished with fruit trees instead of the more modern practice of idolising Caribbean pines and trees that do not encourage thieves to climb over your paling (a modern excuse). Most fruit was exchanged between households: a breadfruit or two for your soursops and mangoes, an avocado for your sugar apples.

Corruption was a distant notion. Our founding father would direct anyone offering him money to one of his favourite charities. Today, not only is corruption a bipartisan enterprise, it is rampant in our society, particularly in our ports. How else would you explain the proliferation of guns in our society? Any silence on the matter of corruption is complicit in the nefarious activity. Today it is also prevalent among workers who do not work, but receive pay. This is stealing from the Treasury or put differently, from everyone else who pays taxes. We even have teachers who teach only half-heartedly in public classrooms, but offer expensive private lessons to the same students!

Interestingly, one hears Christian preachers condemning homosexuality, a joke since that too is also a bipartisan endeavour at the highest levels, but none preaches against corruption, which is arguably the most pernicious of all crimes. Yet one calls constantly for the Christian Church to do something about our errant youth. Did anyone stop to ask why there is not also a plethora of Muslim youth committing crime? It is not the mosque that ensures strict standards, but the Muslim family.

Our founding father revolutionised our education system in making it free. He enfranchised us, the poor Bajan. We have since turned his great service into a disservice. We then ensured that there would always be an elite class by adopting the 11-Plus at the point where even the British were abandoning it. We were in the process of ensuring that the children of the privileged had a better chance of going to one of the better staffed and provisioned schools and ultimately moving on in life while the less privileged flunked a silly exam, which only tests children in English and Maths. My grandchildren, who have grown up outside of Barbados, would pass the 11-Plus with flying colours. They would do less well in subjects with a greater local content. Why do we insist on maintaining this system? What happens to the increasing number of failures in this system? Check with every young person accused or convicted of murder or some equally egregious crime, and there will be two common factors – a poor education and a weak family background in terms of its functionality, like co-operating father and mother or back-up grandparents.

In terms of dysfunction, we have it in great swathes, largely because we seldom attempt to analyse any situation. We prefer to borrow wholesale from our colonial masters. In Barbados, we have a decent pool of thinkers, with few of them represented in our Parliament. But few Ministers seek outside assistance, or even bounce their ideas off trusted thinkers. What about having think tanks on all sorts of areas? There is no politician who knows his strengths better than one who acknowledges his weaknesses. There are several better ways of doing the things that are necessary than the way we do most of them now.

Let me attempt to throw some light rather than to continue to emphasise the darkness. There are two pieces of legislation loitering somewhere in the Ministry of Legal Affairs – a Freedom of Information Bill and an Integrity Bill. The passage of both, plus a significant change in our outdated Defamation Act, would see a significant decrease in corruption in the places where it most occurs. With so many lawyers in Parliament, is it not amazing that we have not removed the offending exclusion clause or even attempted any sort of constitutional reform?

With respect to education, I would like to see the 11-Plus kaibosched and some reasonable system replace it. I would also like to see a system in which teachers are encouraged to upgrade their skills throughout their careers and genuine concentration on early childhood education. This requires extensive specialist training.

I believe that this area should be highly compensated. I believe that this would eliminate much of the disparity between students at the primary school level and give particularly the children of the poorest a better shot at life.

I would also introduce a national work service scheme for all school leavers of one year duration. It would be run by the Defence Force (which should hopefully instil some discipline) and it would involve creating a cadre of youngsters who help repair the homes of old, impecunious folk as well as doing other civic duties. If one asks why, the answer is twofold: It is payback for a free education, and it will give future University students a look into the real world of work. Beyond that, it will almost certainly weed out the need for the gangs, which now plague us. Perhaps those emerging from this experience without the qualifications for entering a tertiary institution should be offered the opportunity to continue to study or they could possibly form a new body with responsibility for making Barbados clean again.