Ian Walcott, (B. Sc., M.A., M.Sc.) lectures and consults with leading local and regional companies in the discipline of Project Management.
He is one of the founding members of the Barbados Chapter of the Project Management Institute. Mr. Walcott was also instrumental in conceptualizing the Caribbean & Latin American Conference on Project Management which has become the region’s leading forum on the discipline.
A former OAS research fellow in International Political Economy at the University of Brasilia, Brazil, Mr. Walcott also spent two years at the International University of Japan where he specialized in Comparative Business and Management. As a member of the International Association of Theatre Critics (IATC) he also dedicates his time to the development of the theatre arts in the Caribbean.
Source: Connect CP
We have now experienced a full year after the Cricket World Cup and some may still say it’s too early to make an assessment. But alas the people spoke and the grand CEO of that project, the then Prime Minister of Barbados, Owen Arthur, was fired from his job by his very own subjects. This is telling.
Anyone travelling throughout the Caribbean region during the Arthur era would have been proud to be Barbadian because on the regional scene he was so well admired. Today if we go through the region, our brothers and sisters are still at a loss for words to express their dismay as to why such a perceived good leader was fired by the Barbadian people. To this I say the answer is very simple. You simply cannot fast track development. When leaders move ahead of the pace of their people, the result is always the same, they fail.
A name that had the opportunity to go down in history will now probably be best remembered as an ego maniac who refused to listen to the voices of his people and who lost his way in the labyrinth of his own mindless dreams. The best example of this was his total buy-in of the Cricket World Cup and the support he was able to drum up from corporate Barbados. But were the people there with him? A drive pass the Kensington Oval white elephant will give us a clear answer. Millions of dollars in debt standing tall amidst urban squalor, neighborhoods with a still very high index of poverty, poor housing, lack of job opportunity, open drains, limited access to good health care and a sewerage system that stinks.
So the dream was to use the World Cup as a catalyst for development to fast track us into some kind of modern island-city with big highways, an efficient hospital and the list of pipe dreams went on. Good on paper, an excellent end of term essay but zero in execution and because you failed you were fired Mr. Arthur. But alas you are not alone. You are not the first or the last leader who believes that there’s a fast track to development. And this is because we’ve been sold on a paradigm of development that is twisted, distorted and illusory and only serves the purpose of the global economic elite.
A viewing of Spielberg’s recent movie, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, becomes instructive as to what true development is all about. The true El Dorado is not a city of gold but the quest for knowledge. This is why 20 odd years after his death, Errol Barrow was able to draw Barbadians from all walks of life and all generations to Independence Square to view the unveiling of his statue. In his wisdom he understood that development was first about people – liberate the mind, educate the people and anything else is possible after that. This advice was also echoed in the 1990s from the Japanese government to the then Malaysian Prime Minister, Dr. Mahathir Mohamed. Their advice was simple, double your number of university postgraduates in the next twenty years.
Professor Selwyn Ryan, in a recent article in the Trinidadian press, lamented the fact that the Manning administration is now taking a similar route of trying to fast track development and cash in quickly on the windfall derived from high oil prices. We are seeing similar patterns evolve in Trinidad as in the Brazilian city of Sao Paulo or Caracas, Venezuela in the 1970s. Everyday high rise buildings are erected and the basics of human existence are ignored. So it’s not difficult to foretell the future outcomes of such an exercise. Human behavior is very predictable, if large chunks of the population are left out of the economic pie, the human instinct to survive will kick in – man will become envious and if he’s hungry enough will kill, steal and plunder to survive. In other parlance some call it crime. This is the story of every American inner city and it will be no different here in the Caribbean.
So why not let us fast track development of the mind? Take care of people first! Errol Barrow understood this. With my own ears as a teenager too young to vote at the time, I heard him say in 1986 when he regained the government that his next big project was housing. Unfortunately he didn’t live long enough for this to be materialized. The men that followed him didn’t hear what I heard or they chose to ignore him; and instead they constructed buildings and wide highways and sold off the West Coast. In essence they did not listen to the Father of Independence. This is because they do not understand Independence. The Father understood that true development and true Independence are one of the same thing. So it was not a mere breaking away from the colonial masters but it was a freeing of the mind and uplifting of the human spirit and making a people believe in themselves to be capable of anything. After we have achieved this feat then the buildings and highways will come naturally, but if we try to fast track the cosmetics and ignore the basics, history will always be unkind to us.
So please don’t let our egos and our finite nature get in the way of true development. Listen to the people. The Barbadian people need the basics, better housing, excellent health care, job opportunities and education. Take care of these and the rest will happen organically. Master the basics and history will remember you for centuries to come as a true liberator.
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