Submitted by the People’s Democratic Congress (PDC)

The idea that Mr. Peter Boos has of making sure that Barbados becomes the No. 1 entrepreneurial hub in the world by 2020 – is one big bogus idea.

Such an idea needs to be put alongside that of another big flawed, foolish idea – one which was often bandied about by the last BLP Government in the early 2000s, and one which by mid 2000s had become utterly meaningless  – the bid to make Barbados become a developed country by 2020.

While the PDC has no qualms whatsoever with Mr. Boos’ voicing  support for the development of a strong entrepreneurial culture in Barbados in the long term, we have great difficulty at this stage with this attempt of his to “play” with the minds of many people in this country, with this illusory notion of Barbados becoming the No 1 entrepreneurial hub of the world by 2020.

Furthermore, whereas we do not have any problem with this goodly public figure espousing values consistent with the achievement of a better entrepreneurialism for Barbados, we do have fundamental misgivings with he and his group (Barbados Entrepreneurship Foundation) having held a useless ineffectual two-day Barbados National Entrepreneurship Summit in the expensive plushness of a Needham Ballroom of the Hilton Hotel, decorated with “flashing lights”, and interrupted with “pulsating music and snazzy slideshows” ( pg. 15 Monday, December 6, 2010, Barbados Business Authority), when, at a point in time of increasing, great hardship and misery for so many thousands in Barbados, he and they could have made use of the ordinary comfort of some community centers, some schools across the country, to put forward real effective ideas to help solve many of the fundamental social, political, material and financial problems presently facing the broad masses and middle classes of people of this country.

What a spectacular dastard shame!!!

Indeed, what Barbadian history has so far told us – the PDC – is that with contradictions such as those remaining unresolved, there will be bound to continue in this country, a  sufficiency of social material conditions that will gather along the way that will provide the triggers for great social political conflict in Barbados in the foreseeable future, unless popular intervention takes place in this country, in a country that is well under way to becoming a second rate so-called Third World developing country – a tale of two Barbadoses – the rich continuing to live in luxury, and the poor in pure misery.

Yet, against the backdrop of these well known contradictions, Boos mockingly writes, in a very Lincolnist way, in the said Barbados Business Authority edition, “that the push for Barbados to become the No. 1 entrepreneurial hub was born of Barbadian people for Barbadian people and can only be delivered by Barbadians, and that success will require the spirit and innovation in all Barbadians to be unleashed; no single group can succeed in this significant national challenge. It is better than each of us”.

Hence, Boos can rightly be accused of getting off to a bad start with this idea of his already,  in terms of his falsely playing to the hearts and minds of the people of Barbados, with  open-ended emotional and vague ideals. Also, it is very clear by his actions that he is NOT prepared to walk – literally, metaphorically – alongside of  many of the ordinary people in this country, who he believes have to be among the main recipients of his ill-directed distorted message – as well as the other main recipients being many of those among the local and international elites!!

But, how can Boos expect to help create a new entrepreneurship culture for Barbados, and, in the process, start off with such an elitist conservative agenda, when at the same time the soaring psychological  heights to which he wishes many of our hapless poor middle class workers in  government, in the traditional private sector, etc. to ascend to, are out of sync with and are hindered by the realities of facing up to daily struggles to redeem a very high cost of living that is helped up by the old entrepreneurial business class in this country?

And, how reasonable can he be when he sets about imagining the creating of such a culture without  defining properly for the public what he means by an entrepreneurial hub?; without saying exactly what he means by Barbados becoming the No 1 entrepreneurial hub in the world?, and without stating exactly where Barbados is right now positioned within the context of any understanding that these types of deficiencies in rationalization really exist? and within the context of an assumption that there is this   “mapped trajectory” that would really take Barbados towards this “goal”? – indeed, some of the types of colossal intellectual political errors former prime minister Owen Arthur made with his references to Barbados becoming a developed country.

But, who would believe that  nearly twenty years ago, at a time of great economic financial crisis in Barbados, this “same” Boos was at the forefront of major criticisms and attempts that were being made by certain people in Barbados to get the rid of the then democratically elected Sandiford Government – but  which ultimately then was something they succeeded in doing some couple years later on?? So, in 1991, he and many others esp. within the Barbados Private Sector Agency/the Barbados Labour Party, and the BWU/NUPW trade unions had accused the Sandiford Government of gross incompetence in the management of the economic affairs of the country, and had called for Mr. Sandiford (now Sir Lloyd) and company  to go – publicly and privately. Thus, Boos  had sought a demagogic political solution to that particular problem.

Now, twenty years onwards, and with Barbados being in a far worse material financial position than at that time, a now retired, less combative individual, sees entrepreneurship as a primary political business financial solution to the country’s economic performance. Perhaps Boos, is now fighting the political ghost of Sandiford, with his seeking to conjure up a PRIVATE SECTOR counterfoil to another equally flawed joke idea that Barbados is  not only an economy but also a SOCIETY.

But, in his piece in the said Barbados Business Authority, he is reported as saying that Barbados requires a new entrepreneurial dynamic that will transform our economic performance. What trash!!!

Clearly, entrepreneurialism, or entrepreneurship, cannot be reasonably seen by the PDC as the solution to what are some of the very big deep-seated political material financial problems facing this country at this stage, and moreover as one relates this question of a solution to  the fundamental issue of countrymen and women doing the right things to reposition and restructure the material productive distribution and financial affairs of this country – when entrepreneurship is already a major problem itself in Barbados. He just needs to ask a former President of the BCCI, who some time ago suggested that too many business people depended on government for too many things!!

Furthermore, what has also made  Boos’ idea to help make Barbados become the No 1 entrepreneurial hub by 2020, so untenable, so wretched already is that he has so far failed to speak to the fact that entrepreneurship (the entrepreneurial function)  is just one of the other major factors of production existing within Barbados (the others being land, labour, capital, technology, managerial capacity, etc).

So, for him to theoretically rig up five so-called pillars, that he says are so important in helping to create the conditions necessary for entrepreneurial success in Barbados – Finance Availability, Government Policy, Business Facilitation, Education and Talent, Mentoring and Networking – although good in themselves in any bid to bring about  entrepreneurial success,  at the apparent expense of the development of the other four or so main factors of production that  exist within Barbados, and at the expense of the milieus or conditions within which they are found, is/must be an example of an old envious publicity seeking chartered accountant whose best attempts are with the promulgation of very old myopic unstudied ideas.

And what will surely undermine if not derail his thrust in pursuit of this ignus fatuus idea is that of the old archaic planter  merchant driven entrepreneurial culture and spirit that way back in 1991, needed to be dug up and remoulded, but which was not then done so, primarily because he and many others wished to extract short term political capital/gain, and as such the dangerous parochial effects of such a culture and spirit which continue to be ignored by him and  henchmen for strong remedial action.

Also, would Boos not have previously thought  at any time before,  that this brand of Quixotism of his would be hurt by his or his cronies’ in Barbados, being in no position whatsoever at any time to control the rate at which other entrepreneurial hubs in this world would be growing and developing? and hence these kinds of factors signifying that he  and they would be in no position to determine whether Barbados would be no 1 by any particular time?? Also, for him and his cronies to have previously mused on the smallness of and the untold imperfections and inadequacies found within the goods and services market spaces in his island, would have been a little more than enough to tell them that these kinds of considerations would be far more important than seeking to generate public passion and enthusiasm on the basis of this very flawed idea of his?

Meanwhile, in the said Barbados Business Authority edition,  a Mr. Randolph Sandiford, in  presenting a very contrasting side to the “issue” of whether Barbados can become the No 1 entrepreneurial hub by 2020?, does  make it quite clear that he believes that Barbados’s ability to become an entrepreneurial hub is more dependent on political will than on sheer research and analysis.

He also suggests that with the type of slow-moving bureaucratic obstacles found in Barbados, this  idea of Boos becomes  largely still born.

While Sandiford is, to some extent, accurate in those and some other views on such a question, it is discomfiting still that he has left open the possibility that Barbados can indeed become an entrepreneurial hub by such a time, once the requisite political conditions that would lead to a type of authoritarianism would be present.

Well, for us, though, what we must tell Boos, Sandiford and many others in Barbados, is that there will be no such entrepreneurial hub that Barbados can at anytime time ever become unless – great causes such as the Abolition of Taxation, the Abolition of Interest Rates, the Abolition Motor Vehicle Insurance, Abolition of the virtual Social State, etc. are realized, and the “right” people centered democratic social, political, material and financial  systems, and the “right” strategies structures to support such systems put in place, to help make sure that Barbados becomes a world class society in an increasingly integrative, competitive increasingly globalized environment.

So long.