#BTColumn – What is our destiny as a Republic?

The views and opinions expressed by the author(s) do not represent the official position of Barbados TODAY.

by Ralph Jemmott

The discourse on Barbados’ path to Republican status has been a very curious one. Listen to some and you would think the debate was much to do about nothing, a storm in a veritable teacup.

It was long overdue, they say, the time is now right or, as right as it has ever been and it really isn’t going to make any significant difference to the way the country is run.

Listen to others, and Republican status represents a historic moment, marking a fundamental break with
396 years of British rule. It will, they contend, determine the country’s destiny and will reflect the values of “who we are,” whatever those values are perceived to be.

In the decades of relativism and rapid change, the value consensus of the 1950’s and 60’s has long disintegrated. Now which one is it? Continuum or significant change? Novelist and social critic George Lamming has observed that ‘caution’ is a quality that ‘inheres’ in the Barbadian persona. Bajans love an individual to individual ‘bassa-bassa’ but they do not like social upheaval.

I do not know that since 1966 the British government has in any significant way intervened in Barbados’ politics. Maybe like the taking down of Lord Nelson, the significance of Republican status is primarily symbolic, an arguably legitimate appeal to anti-colonial sentiment.

Lamming once said that in his early years in England a white Englishman, on hearing that he was Barbadian, asked him: “Are you one of ours?” Historical retrospective can be useful, but as Dr. Eric Williams once warned, it can be dangerous driving forward while looking through the rear view mirror. This assumes that the vehicle’s transmission is firmly set in drive and not in reverse mode.     

What we do in the now may very well determine our future, but the future is known to no one. History takes some curious turns. In 1804 Haiti became the first and only successful New World slave revolt and the first Black Republic. Today Haiti is recognised as the poorest country
in the New World and in one writer’s words “a great inglorious ruin”.

Armed gangs roam the capital, Port au Prince, kidnapping persons apparently at will. Not all this is the Haitians’ fault. Victimisation by the great powers after 1804 was a significant factor in retarding Haiti’s development, but so too was misrule by a number of subsequent black leaders. The fact that the country is located on a tectonic fault-line and is subject to serious earthquakes has not helped.

But to return to the question of destiny. The future of the American Republic today is very much in doubt. Who would have thought that a Constitution so well constructed with its check and balances and a marked separation of powers between the Executive, the Legislature and the Judiciary would find itself so threatened as it is today.

Who would have thought that partisan folly and moral decay would be a result of the election of Donald J. Trump, a man of few intellectual gifts and even fewer moral sensibilities, what CNN’s Jake Tapper terms “an absence of shame”. It was Winston Churchill who stated that “the malice of the wicked is assisted by the weakness of the virtuous.”

In 1966, Barbados embarked on a challenging new path and there were cynics then too. In spite of our present difficulties, few would claim that the Independence enterprise has been a failure. We produced able leaders with a reasonably high sense of public morality and the pragmatism to manage things with some degree of rationality.

Part of our current apprehension is that we may be embarking on republican status with no awareness of the intended republican constitution that is to guide us. With indecent haste or someone’s sense of their own destiny, the proverbial cart was placed before the proverbial horse.

Everything may turn out to be all right. There may be those who may want more from the new republican destiny. A small but vocal minority seems to want to define the narrative for a leadership that I am not sure, beyond the rhetoric, fully understands what that implies.

Some may well be seeking a change in the ownership of the factors of economic production and changes in a class structure based on ostensibly progressive notions of redistributive politics. In terms of real politik, these issues can be highly problematic.

Part of our problem is determining a positive republican destiny is knowing the political infrastructure in which Barbados functions in the short and medium terms. One factor is that there is currently little evidence of an effective political opposition that can serve as a check on a hasty government that may not always think through the issues or may want to over-play its hand in determining policy.

Secondly, there may be some doubt about the declining quality of a political class once described by another leader as “poor-rakey” and thirdly there must be some concern about the quality of our collective intelligence.

Beyond all that, may be the fact that a small open, vulnerable economy may continue to struggle in a highly competitive and challenging global capitalist environment. For example some 136 countries have recently agreed to President Biden’s plan to implement a global minimum tax rate of 15 per cent.

This agreement due to come into effect in 2023, could have an adverse effect on Barbados’ off –shore business sector. That sector, next to tourism, has been the single greatest driver of Barbados’ economic growth.

If Barbados is to pursue a positive republican destiny, it should stay true to our tradition of a centrist political economy.

The imperatives of which should constitute, firstly, the praxis of liberal democracy, a free market, mixed public/private sector economy and guarantees of certain civic freedoms enshrined in statute law. All these must be pursued in a climate of enforced law, order and social discipline.
The day we divert from these imperatives we are courting danger and decay.   

One columnist writing with puerility that now comes so easily to so many university academics has suggested that on November 30, 2021, ‘Rastafari and all progressives should hold a large rally, beat African drums and sing redemption songs to celebrate that Babylon has finally fallen.

I once lived in Jamaica. In the land of the Nyahbinghi, the word ‘Babylon’ connoted the white commercial establishment and its brown and black middle class surrogates. Why would the election of a native black female Head of State as President of a Barbadian Republic suggests that ‘Babylon has finally fallen?’ If so? What now?

What will be our Republican destiny?  

Ralph Jemmott is a respected retired educator.