Late on Tuesday, US President Joe Biden was preparing to address a joint session of Congress, Supreme Court justices and dignitaries including specially invited guests as narrative devices.
The annual State of the Union address has no serious equal in our young republic; the President’s Speech – the reincarnated Throne Speech – warms over the administration’s manifesto. It rarely makes a full pronouncement on the state of the government at the point of delivery.
Over the years, we have had occasional report cards and propagandist paraphernalia trucked out in election campaigns but never a formal accounting to Parliament on the performance of the government. Budget speeches, once important set pieces in the fiscal calendar, have been relegated to the status of occasional footnotes since the introduction of value added tax.
But what Barbadians need to hear is not triumphalism, posturing or a blame game. They deserve more than an ersatz copy of an American State of the Union or Throne Speech in new garb. After two long and painful years of the worst economic and social crisis of the century, we should expect to see the administration’s blueprint for reconstruction.
A standard Throne Speech – ahem, President’s Speech – following Labour’s electoral triumph – might soothe the party faithful and a few parliamentary traditionalists. But we have yet to know exactly how the Government plans to recover the lost years of 2020 and 2021.
The same timetable for reform, reconstruction and renovation that one would expect to follow a category five hurricane should be created to rescue Barbados from the doldrums of disease, death and dormancy.
We have had our “hurricane”. More than 300 people have died as a pandemic has become endemic. The response to the coronavirus has shifted to autopilot as vaccination rates stagnate.
We are chiefly concerned with the state of education, the spearhead of national development. The resumption of physical classes has not taken into account the incredible learning deficit that a generation of young Barbadians has experienced.
While ordering civil servants back to work, a great many students are restricted to no more than two or three days of instruction. On their days home, children as young as single digits are expected to engage in self-directed study, preferably under the watchful gaze of parents who are either unemployed, on sick leave or fortunate enough to work from home under a nebuious “flexitime” plan.
In addition to this, or perhaps, more aptly, in subtraction of, their schooling, classes are dismissed a full hour to 90 minutes early. And all this must continue during a school year that has not been lengthened by a day, despite the extraordinary situation in which our children find themselves.
As for those who are expected to enter secondary school this year, they are still to matriculate by means of the same examination whose imminent abolition had been declared in the first Mottley administration. The methodology for the reorganization of high schools, the timetable for this activity and the implications for students under unprecedented strain all remain unanswered. This cannot long continue.
The resumption of physical instruction seems to have had done nothing more than fill parents with dread for their children’s educational prospects. So a few parents who have weathered COVID’s economic storms will fork out large sums of cash for teachers to moonlight as private tutors. The lessons business not only thrives but has been given a new lease on life while the government to whom we hand over hundreds of millions of tax dollars apparently fumbles with undeclared certitude.
This sorry stasis is emblematic of the gaping hole where a recovery policy ought to be in vast swathes of national life – agriculture, energy, culture, technology, health, law and order, constitutional reform. As Biden ascended the dais to speak on the State of Union, his troubled Build Back Better agenda lay on the operating table as politicians, including those in his own party, wield a rough scalpel.
At least there is a reconstruction agenda on the table of that republic. But where is ours?
