Caribbean poverty on display

Hurricane Dorian’s impact on the people of The Bahamas underlines the imperative need for reparatory justice.

Vice Chancellor of the University of the West Indies, Professor Sir Hilary Beckles, made it clear the poverty still existing for the working class in a post-colonial world increased this group’s vulnerability to natural hazards.

“What you see is how Caribbean poverty is on display. Poverty and vulnerability and how nature enters that cocktail and creates a post-colonial nightmare. This type of crisis strikes to the imperative of reparatory justice,” he stressed.

Addressing the Vice Chancellor Forum on Hurricane Recovery in The Bahamas, Sir Hilary, who is Chairman of the CARICOM Reparation Commission, noted: “It is always the core dying in their hundreds over the years, working people not yet recovered from colonialisation and hanging on to environments that really are not suited for 21st century accommodation.

“We have thousands of our citizens in the Caribbean living in these spaces, and here in this community of Abaco called Mudd would go down in history where thousands of persons built their homes on a bed of mud that when subject to water – whether rainfall or the power of the ocean driven by wind – is literally washed and blown away. It is a tragedy of history alive today in the present and this is why the issue of reparatory justice becomes so very important to the interface of history, hurricanes and death.

“And we in the academic fraternity have to raise our conscience in relation to these communities across our archipelago, who have been left abandoned in a post independence world that was never subject to a development plan from the colonisers, to bring these people to a space where they could live as modern 21st century citizens of the Caribbean,” he added. (JMB)