The irrepressible pragmatism of the Barbadian citizen is far too infrequently sharpened into a savage barb that must jab the side of the State, e.g.: “Wunna got Republic but I can’t get back my taxes”. To the citizen, the State’s inertia, incompetence in the provision of basic services cuts them to the core.
Every insistence on the adequate supply and even distribution of that for which they have paid up front in the form of taxes on everything from bread to wages is too often met with an assault from a vocal minority that condemns those who ask as mendicant. No one lobbied for, voted for or paid taxes to get cash handouts from the State for doing their duty to save this nation from the ravages of a pandemic. They did, however, pay for the buses they ride on and the roads they ride on, just as they have paid upfront for free education, health care and social services at the point of delivery, clean waters, shores and skies, and the security of person and commons against violence, robbery, toxins and menaces.
This, then, is not about bread and circuses but the very purpose and promise of the government to ensure its citizens are equal before the law. There can be no other point in a country’s history, when it has achieved full republican status, that this should be more evident.
More later on the relative failure of the Barbadian state to meet such needs but for now, we call on the Government’s attention to a singular example among many – the heavily lopsided approach to the maintenance of our dense road network, the thickest that can be found on any island anywhere on Earth. It is because we acknowledge this fact of density that we expect systemic solutions for the repair and care of roads, urban, suburban and rural.
It is now past inexcusable that in the sixth decade of independence, as we cloak our officialdom in new, republican raiments and perquisites with pomp and pageantry, there are long roads in Barbados on which hundreds of fellow taxpayers live that have never been paved and continuously defy attention, years after ministerial visits and parliamentary questions. It is here that the Barbadian’s obdurate tenacity of the pragmatic should rattle the gates of the political citadel.
One such road – of several – mostly to be found in our rural districts, is a one kilometre stretch at Cottage Vale, St Philip, due west of the better-paved Webb Hill. It must be declared that this newspaper has no vested interest in this community, has no knowledge of how its residents vote (as if that should matter) and stands neither to gain or lose from the persistent inattention to their plight. But the cause of the people of Cottage Vale is now our cause, as it is that of any such village, hamlet or tenantry that continues to defy basic attention.
The people of Cottage Vale are not without requisite political nous; it has come to the attention of this newspaper that they have affixed hundreds of signatures to a petition calling for their road to be made and for their quality of life there to be made whole, safe from ignominious doom should medical emergency or natural hazard plague their community. This call was made years ago. We are also aware that one of the community’s most illustrious sons, who by then had risen to the highest echelons of government, toured the area with a public works minister and parliamentary representative – two elections ago.
It is inconceivable that a road on which a former cabinet minister in this administration actually grew to manhood has been utterly neglected. At least, then, he can claim to have granted no political favours – the residents he left behind are equal in their misery. Yet it is unimaginable how, despite the creation of a Rural Development Commission and the erection of concrete roads in other ridings, this district should be distinguished by its neglect.
It is this sort of abject political poverty that threatens to mock any earnest move at constitutional reform. What good is a fresh contract between the State and its People if the current, imperfect one is honoured in the breach in the smallest things? The invisibility of country folk to colonial government is a feature that somehow has been saved by pettifogging bureaucrats and myopic representatives. For it isn’t the cart road but the cart road mentality of the body politic that concerns us even more.
Another year, a brand new one, with the same old, colonial-era cart roads in this Republic is not only unacceptable but obscene. The fight against inequality cannot only be waged by attending to GDP growth. The Barbadian pragmatist will not be convinced of this when they see highways hardly in need of repair being paved afresh while urban and rural road-building and mending tends to follow a haphazard pattern only discernible nearer a general election. Like in Cottage Vale, St Philip.
We invite all those readers whose villages have been forgotten to press for an urgent fix. We invite citizens to take the journey along this particular road for themselves and ask, is this a handout the villagers seek or a near-sacred obligation of the governors to the governed? For now, we urge the Government of the Republic to answer the question – by starting with Cottage Vale, St Philip.
