Republic move lacking ‘soul’, says UWI professor

The manner in which Government has chosen to transition to a Republic has been described as soulless.

It has come from Director of the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies (SALISES), Professor Don Marshall who has maintained that there has been no real involvement of Barbadians in the process.

He made the comments while appearing as a panelist at last night’s virtual town hall meeting hosted by the University of the West Indies under the theme, Constitutional Reform and the Republic: Symbolism, Substance and Implications.

“Besides wanting to see a mass mobilization and enthusiasm around it, that’s one way of wanting to see evidence of what we call a popular movement towards this idea of a Republic, but I would like to characterize what is going on as a soulless transition.

“It lacks soul, it lacks character and it is largely to do with what I would call the matrixes of power, of socio-economic power relations cleaved around a particular understanding of what this project is all about. So the status quo for lack of a better term, is in not any way affected…and that’s why it has taken on this soulless character,” Professor Marshall said.

His comments were in response to a view put forward by Dr Tennyson Joseph that Barbados’ transition to a Republic was not a revolutionary moment.

“We are not seeing the large mobilization of public opinion, we are not seeing the little rum shop meetings and the spontaneous village councils discussing it because it is not a revolution taking place. It is an evolutionary transformation of a Constitution. It’s like we’re removing an appendix so that’s no big deal to the human biology in any way,” maintained Dr Joseph who is head of the Department of Government, Sociology and Social Work at the UWI.

“Government, as the vanguard of the population, as the most advanced section of the population, has decided to make the move. If there was a more advanced section of the population than the Government we would be hearing the call from that more advanced section. They would be leading the discussion and we would be seeing the Government lagging behind and then they heavily criticize the Government for being behind the people, but we do not see it because it does not exist.”

Speaking from a perspective of an economist, president of the Barbados Economic Society Dr Simon Naitram said he did not anticipate a huge fallout as a result of the transition to the Republic.

He said the move away from England would not result in any great financial loss to the country.

“I think it is pretty obvious to most people that there isn’t going to be a significant or direct economic impact of this. There isn’t going to be a huge change in how our economy works, there isn’t any significant loss and I think somewhere along the line that wasn’t made clear to everyone.

“Maybe some people still have this lingering feeling that we’re breaking away from the United Kingdom and in that there is some loss of a relationship that will lead to a loss of trade or a loss of economic activity or some way a loss of livelihood.
(RB)