BU listened with interest to the Governor of the ECCB Sir Dwight Venner as he delivered the annual Leo Leacock Memorial Lecture during Small Business Week 2014 (SBA) which ran from September 21 to September 27. Of interest also: the week culminated with an Awards Ceremony and Dinner at the Hilton with our friendly neighbourhood academic Avinash D. Persad invited to deliver the featured address titled The Entrepreneurial State. Coincidentally, Persad delivered the annual Leo Leacock lecture in 2009. A pet peeve of BU is why the race by the SBA to invite so many academics to address an audience presumably of budding and established entrepreneurs. Persad’s speech was littered with the usual amorphous references to Steve Jobs, Carlos Slim, Larry Ellison with no reference to past or rising entrepreneurs from Barbados or the region who have blazed a trail. This is the problem BU has with academics who often (through no fault of their own) become detached from the reality. And no BU is not anti academic.
For those who listened and observed his body language Sir Dwight Venner expressed a hopelessness with the Barbados development engine for absconding its leadership role in the region. Bear in mind this is a man who walks in the shadows of regional political and business leaders. We all agree SMEs have to be part of the solution but we continue to struggle jumpstarting the sector. Like a stuck record we have to listen to SBA CEO Lynette Holder’s query whether we have a category called entrepreneur in Barbados or whether our policymakers even acknowledge an invigorated SME sector as being critical to the lifeblood of the Barbados economy. Like the minibus culture which has been allowed to take root by successive administrations so too they have demonstrated a basement level of ignorance about how to foster an environment that will release the potential of the Barbadian entrepreneur.
Is it not logical to conclude that our pre-colonial education model is failing us and we need to change it? Are our leaders unable to appreciate if we continue to use the same model we will not get a different result? We are happy to produce a nation of employees by suppressing those who would aspire to create capital by unleashing talents driven by a yearning to self actualize swimming in an ethos of entrepreneurial activity? Are we a highly literate nation or not?
Now that Comrade Bobby Morris agrees with the policy of the government making todays students bear some tertiary level education cost, now is a good time to implement some of the many measures recommended over the years to make it more relevant. Newton’s third law teaches that ‘for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction’. The decision by government to ask students and parents to incur about 20% debt to cover tertiary level education will have an opposite reaction. Bear in mind the request to pay university fees must be assessed against government’s declared policy of implementing user fees for a number of other services including health care. To quote Minister Donville Inniss Barbadians expect the government to provide everything from ‘conception to resurrection’ whatever that means.
If we accept the science of Newton what can we expect as a reaction to increasing student debt and an uncertain environment in which to work. The following analysis Student Debt And The Millennial Entrepreneurship Paradox may allow us to peer into the future whether we like it or not. We have to try harder because what we have been doing up to now is not working. David Ellis featuring a few entrepreneurs who have struggled against the current is does not obviate the need to establish a movement.
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