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By Marsha Hinds Myrie
On Wednesday, I was sitting in my office settling into work and listening to an edition of a popular talk show in Barbados. In response to the public lament about the pending raise of pay for politicians in Barbados, a sitting government senator was defending the salary point of Barbadian politicians partly by indicating that running political campaigns took time away from other professional endeavours and that it was hard for politicians after that to rejoin practice or be employable.
This statement did not ring right to me after having been involved in politics at various levels, the highest being a nomination candidate in the national election process. I was able to maintain my professional standing, run in the campaign and reintegrate into my professional life after the political cycle ended.
I pointed to a few reasons why I could do that but all a subsequent caller to Brasstacks got was that I was wiping myself clean and casting aspersions on other people involved in the political process. Print media offers a bit more width to make a point and I want to both restate my primary argument in the call and expand the argument in what I think are important ways.
The reason I called the programme to make an intervention on the practice of politics in Barbados was that, in my estimation, the impression was being given that any kind of political involvement sullies a professional so badly that they have little opportunity to return to jobs after politics. The premise was being used to justify increases to the remuneration amounts for politicians in Barbados. The point I made is that while some of the activity associated with the current practice of party politics in Barbados may lead to a person being excluded from professional life after politics this was only one outcome and not the outcome of being involved in politics.
Put differently, a person could run a campaign without some of the features that decent Barbadians have come to dislike as features of our political system and with the full knowledge that after politics, room to reintegrate into professional life was important.
I see the argument that politicians in Barbados are a special type of people who need special types of protection to be unsubstantiated. To start, being involved in politics in Barbados has historically been a privilege associated with standalone professions. Before the constitutional ruling of 2023 that made clear way for civil servants not to be excluded from political involvement a large section of professionals in Barbados not just found it difficult to become involved in politics but were legally barred. The result has been that disproportionately the candidate pool in Barbados has been filled by lawyers, doctors, consultants and accountants.
In addition to the resources that they can muster from professional networks and goodwill, many political candidates are heavily dependent on party finances and the party machinery to sustain a campaign. This has long been a mechanism of the party whip. This perhaps where the professional and other types of sullying starts for many a person seeking to become involved in politics.
Candidates self censure and leave issues that are not on the common agenda of the party off to a side to two the party line. Candidates can also easily become consumed by the lack of up-to-date campaign funding guidelines in Barbados. These are the types of things that can cause a challenge for professional integration.
I reject this type of political practice being passed off as the only way to practice politics. I am aware of regulations that are being imposed by banks and other institutions internationally but there are also time limits to those. I believe there are ways to reintegrate into the work force after politics that do not make the only answer to political involvement being the purview of a small class of people who believe public resources should be on tap to them indefinitely once they become involved in politics. The deeper issue to my mind is who is politics for and who does it serve? Political parties in contemporary Barbados are no longer connected to social issues in the same way as Barrow’s Democratic Labour Party or Adam’s Barbados Labour Party In fact, activists in the third sector, particularly those one who challenge government policy are seen as ‘troublesome’ or ‘embarrassing the government’ and who often do their work on a volunteer basis and without the guarantee of any pension are far more susceptible to being frozen out of employment than politicians. Yet we are not making a case for this special category of remunerations to include those individuals.
The average Barbadian in the street may have been deprived of the language they need to clearly articulate the crux of their grouses with the proposed increases for politicians.
The last time civics was officially taught in any primary or secondary classroom is Barbados was in the 1970s. Social Studies may be the closest subject, but topics of governance are largely treated with recall teaching. However, there are significant and deep issues embedded in this current debate.
I hope we do not only limit the discourse to whether politicians make enough or a lot of money.
In a recent article I argue for the current political class in Barbados – on both sides of the B/D divide to be termed the politourgeoisie. I defined the term as “a special kind of bourgeoisie that arises largely out of the same powerless and progressive systems in Commonwealth Caribbean society but use other types of privileges such as family connections, school tie connections and memberships in elite clubs, lodges and churches to disassociate from and then manipulate the rest of the society mainly driven by their access to governmental political power. Where bourgeoisie may depend on long heritage of money and status, politourgeoisie rely heavily on delusion, veneer, and trickery to maintain their social position.”
Trying to persuade the average Barbadian that politicians should make what struggling masses perceive as disproportionately high salaries because they suffer after politics is an example of the trickery of the politourgeoisie.
It is disingenuous especially when there is no mention of the gains and benefits politics brings including larger professional networks regionally and internationally which are usually lucrative both during and after active politics.
This politourgeosie have caused regression and slippage in Barbados’ independence struggle. Indeed not just Barbados but across the Commonwealth Caribbean, this class has kept the structures of the plantation society that were detrimental to the masses intact for their own gain. The political structures that brought us from plantation rule to post independence plantation rule can take us no further. Fanon was not wrong – there is plenty black skin with white masks about.
– Marsha Hinds Myrie is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Guelph and a practising women and girls advocate.
