#BTColumn – NIS: National bedrock undermined

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By Glyne Murray

When in July 2014, the now late Prime Minister Owen Arthur justified his resignation from a 40-year membership of the Barbados Labour Party (BLP) on the grounds that it had “lost its way, lost its soul”, some detractors sought to dismiss his damning pronouncement as nothing more than the bitterness of a former dominant leader no longer in control of a resurgent political institution. 

While the basis of his harsh condemnation would have been clear to him and those intimately familiar with the moral groundings, political philosophy, internal principles, practices and culture that became traditional to the BLP since its founding in 1938, a series of subsequent events linked to this current administration since 2018 would have given the general public some insight into his now memorable characterisation.

In my view, one of the most glaring examples of betrayal of the very reason why the BLP exists, as summarised in the BLP’s institutional slogan, “A Better Life For Our People”, has been the Government’s brutality with the future of the NIS.

Owen Arthur used to express it in his insistent reminder to Cabinet Ministers, party members, supporters and people at large that his driving force for entering politics was to “stop poor people from being poor” – something that some of the policies in the recent ministerial statement on the Revitalisation of the NIS is not intended to do, steeped as it in the longstanding policies of our financial captors like IMF and the like. The IMF’s “conditionalities” (terms and conditions), always result in the working class and the “most vulnerable” (poor) bearing the brunt of having to endure the harshness of the “adjustments” (reduced standards of living) sold as unavoidable by the decision-makers.

Barbadians are left to wonder what choice language a living Owen Arthur would have used to describe the Government’s major decisions on the NIS – having in the past called some of its NIS proposals “madness”, among other things, and capable of bankrupting the Fund –  bearing in mind that as Minister of Finance, he had charted an earlier and successful reform thrust around 2007, headed by the late actuary Stephen Alleyne.

Persons knowing the social, political and social history and trajectory of Barbados would know that the provision of the equivalent of the NIS had long been the dream, desire and demand of persons calling and working for the betterment of the Barbadian masses from around the 1920s or so, and preceding the formation of mass-based political parties and trade unions.

What finally came into being in 1967 was, therefore, the happy and socially uplifting system and institution whose positive impact was as elevating, empowering, dignifying and socially levelling as the universal right to vote without property qualification in 1951. That is why any move endangering NIS benefits is bound to trigger widespread public objection.

The views, speeches, and activities of such personalities and groupings of these NIS pioneers were to a large extent driven by a determination to get the Barbadian masses from under the boot of the dehumanising poor relief system controlled by the minority white political and economic elite.

To these Bajan oligarchs, the natural lot and destiny of the masses, predominantly Blacks, was to work very hard and productively to increase their wealth and power. Meanwhile, such persons were to depend on the goodwill of the governing class to dispense charity to them through poor law inspectors. That was the extent of their social and moral responsibility to them.

Those who waged the long war for the NIS, including people from the BLP, had a different view of life, roughly based on principles of what was termed democratic socialism and which rejected the concept of overarching individual self-responsibility – as briefly but effectively expressed in the Bajanism, “Every turkey for his own craw.” 

They advocated, fought for and eventually brought about the NIS and its equivalent elsewhere in the region, committed to government facilitating the well-being of workers at all levels by having them financially contributing to their own welfare, with the public sector managing the process on their long-term behalf.

Such persons and those of like mind, thereafter, would be horrified that through none of their own doing and without their consent, contributors in Barbados to the NIS are now being required by a self-proclaimed “caring” government to bear a new form of “taxation” in the form of increased contributions over a longer period of work and, hence, later pensions.

Meanwhile, I have yet to hear from the Government a single explicit reference to or acceptance of responsibility for the contents of the opening paragraph of the Executive Summary of the 16th Annual Actuarial Review which, among other things warned, “In October 2018, the NIS Funds suffered from one of the key risk factors associated with pre-funding security benefits – a significant loss of its investments through a debt restructuring exercise…. The NIS lost $1.3 billion or 27 per cent of the face value of all investments. This loss will have a significant impact on the projected outlook…future contribution levels… to ensure its long-term sustainability.”

It would seem that either Owen Arthur’s regular urging to always pursue “clarity of purpose and certainty of outcome” would not have been factored by the Government, since I refuse to believe that none of its multiple experts, advisors and consultants would be unaware of the consequences of violating this basic principle and practice – unless the pursuit of IMF-defined and dictated “efficiency” (austerity) matters most, and our loss will, for the foreseeable future, be nothing more than “collateral damage”.

 Glyne Murray is an author, and former diplomat, Cabinet Minister and journalist.