MIA > Archive > Tim Hector
Fan the Flame, Outlet, 31 January 1997.
Online here https://web.archive.org/web/20120416011318/http://www.candw.ag/~jardinea/fanflame.htm
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
When the CARICOM Skilled Nationals Bill, 1996, was passed in Antigua and Barbuda, it was handled in a vastly different way here, than say in Trinidad and Tobago.
First of all, it was piloted through Parliament here, by the Minister of Labour, Adolphus Freeland, who knew next to nothing, not even that it was in furtherance of a 1989 CARICOM Heads of Government decision to establish a single market and economy of the Caribbean Community. On the contrary, in Trinidad and Tobago, the same bill was piloted through Parliament by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, who was fully conversant with all the CARICOM discussions on the subject.
The Foreign Minister here, Lester Bird, also Prime Minister who was fully conversant with all the CARICOM discussions on the subject since 1989, deliberately ducked piloting the bill because he knew it would be unpopular. So, better put Minister of Labour to take the heat! PM Lester Bird is forever ducking his responsibilities. While he proclaims that “the buck stops here” as his guide in words, he will never carry it through in deed. The Immigration Bill known as the CARICOM Skilled Nationals Act, is but the latest case in point that Lester Bird cannot lead.
In Trinidad and Tobago, Foreign Minister Ralph Maraj, who tabled this Immigration Bill in that Parliament made it clear that “Trinidad and Tobago will not, will not, allow this mechanism to function willy-nilly. It will only be granted to the CARICOM country, if that country reciprocates.” In other words, you take my skilled nationals I will take yours.
The Foreign Minister of Trinidad and Tobago went further, he said that under the CARICOM Skilled Nationals Act, “only five categories of CARICOM professionals will be allowed to work and live freely in Trinidad and Tobago. They are persons involved in accountancy, dentistry, medicine, law, and engineering.”
In other words, Trinidad and Tobago has a clear policy. It knows precisely in what areas, it has a shortage of skilled professionals and it is those areas only it will allow the free movement of Caribbean Community skilled nationals.
Antigua and Barbuda, under Lester Bird, in spite of the fact that the movement of CARICOM nationals had been long planned has developed no plan, therefore has no policy, and can only implement the bill harum-scarum. The government of Antigua has no plan. And therefore this Caribbean Skilled National Act, must scare the living daylights out of everyone in Antigua and Barbuda.
For instance, the government of Antigua and Barbuda, under Lester Bird is the only country in the entire Caribbean, including Haiti which has only two (2) local doctors working in the sole national hospital! Not even Haiti has sunk so low. All local doctors have been hounded out of the lone hospital by the Lester Bird administration, including the distinguished Mr. Cuthwyn Lake and the sole pathologist Dr. Lester Simon. “Locals read and run”, is an unwritten sign pinned up by the Lester Bird administration.
The government of Antigua does not know whether it wants 1 doctor per 1,000 persons, or as in Cuba one (1) doctor per 300 persons. No doubt Lester Bird on seeing this will pull some figure out of his hat and say this is Antigua’s goal. But he will have no realistic plan to attain the goal. The goal will simply be stated for propaganda. Lester Bird is all propaganda, and no performance.
Lester Bird has carried out no study of the skills needs of Antigua and Barbuda. He does not realise that our population in Antigua is the slowest growing population in the entire Caribbean, because of the rate of outward migration, that is, Antiguans leaving Antigua.
For instance Lester Bird does not have a clue that in 1992, there were 63,939 persons inhabiting Antigua and Barbuda, that 1,257 persons were born in Antigua and Barbuda that year 1992, and in the same year 416 persons died so there was a natural population increase of 841 persons in 1992. In that same year however, 798 persons migrated from Antigua which meant that the net total population increase was a mere 43. So that the population increased from 63,896 in 1991 to 63,939 in 1992.
By 1994, the year Lester Bird became Prime Minister, the population of Antigua and Barbuda was only 64,166 because the previous year there was only a net increase of total population of 117 persons, because 685 persons had migrated from Antigua and Barbuda. And most of those migrating were skilled persons.
PM Lester Bird has no clue what to do in these circumstances. No clue whatsoever. The prime need of Antigua and Barbuda was to have a National Skills training programme since at least, 1989, which would aim at producing so many skilled persons per year, allowing for immigration. So then the national stock of skilled persons would increase by at least 12 percent per year. And that 12 per cent is the minimum figure required.
I make no apologies to anyone to say, that only the UPP can effect a National Skills Training programme. For, only the UPP has carried out the requisite study, pains-staking study, of the subject. It was in the course of that study undertaken by the UPP, that I learnt the specific facts stated above.
For instance, UPP knows, by patient study, hard unspectacular work, that by 2004, Antigua and Barbuda needs an additional 50 medical practitioners, and at least 10 dentists to meet a minimal national Health care programme. The question is, are these going to be trained nationals, or are they going to be recruits from India or from another CARICOM country. Once Lester Bird remains in power we know for a fact that only the barest minimum will be trained nationals to meet that national Health Care needs.
Take another instance, for there to be a modest 4 per cent growth in national business, undertaken by national entrepreneurs in 2004, there is required a minimum of 1627 trained nationals. To get there, requires an immediate re-orientation of the education system to produce the computer and accounting needs for that development, and to provide the maintenance personnel of 116 persons needed for that specific undertaking alone. UPP has done the patient study and therefore UPP knows.
The Lester Bird administration can only bung-fungle its way, relying exclusively on foreign nationals, preferably white, to fill its skilled professional needs. It ought to be devoutly avoided.
It is recognising that there is a national emergency for skills that UPP would have turned the former U.S. Navy Base into a National Skills Training centre, advancing to a Polytechnic in five years. Lester Bird could and can conceive no such plan.
Dear Reader, I ask you in all honesty, regardless of your political persuasion, if you think Lester Bird has a clue, that every year since 1990 that the persons voting with their feet, so to speak, leaving this island is nearly a 1,000 persons, and nearly as great as the net birth increase for Antigua and Barbuda? And do you think, that the same Lester Bird recognises that Antiguans and Barbudans are leaving their homeland, because they see that if they remain here, they will most likely remain a part of that large pool of unskilled labour, with no prospect of gaining effective skills needed and required in the 21st century? I leave you to answer, for it is on that answer that the destiny of this country makes or breaks in the 21st century.
Indeed, Lester Bird has no clue, that the outward flow or flood of Antiguans leaving Antigua and Barbuda has been matched by a greater inward flow of foreigners into Antigua and Barbuda, and opening the door wider can lead to Antiguans and Barbudans being overwhelmed, in numbers in their own labour force!!!
I want to make some very difficult points now, which indeed, is harsh criticism of CARICOM, by that I mean, not only the Heads of Government, but of the regional experts who advise and often direct them, so that we have reached this horrendous path.
In the world in which we live now, and more so in the immediate future, especially in the sphere of economics, the market for goods and services will be integrated globally. Production of components or final products, will be undertaken wherever production is most efficient, and sold wherever there is demand. International finance and internationally traded skills will be available, wherever there is demand, and wherever the market climate is hospitable. The idea of geographically protected markets, in which we, as the Caribbean, negotiate for long term supply of products or commodities, under special arrangements is as dead as the world before the door lock, that is, the world of the door nail to lock the door.
The essential challenge which CARICOM countries face in this New World is to expand their productive capacity to gain a place for themselves in this consolidated global market.
CARICOM and CARICOM in particular, is to be solely blamed for the abject failure in diversifying the economies of the Caribbean community, so that at this late, almost too late stage, we are tied into protected Markets, on special arrangements, with no place to go.
In precise terms, CARICOM and the ruling parties who have exclusively directed it, must take the blame for our dilemma with bananas in particular, and the wholesale crisis this means for the entire Caribbean Community, and not just the banana producing territories.
First of all, efforts to allocate industries, to take advantage of the Caribbean community market, failed. And not only failed, but failed miserably. Perhaps nowhere is this more pronounced than in Antigua and Barbuda. For, Antigua and Barbuda cannot reasonably be said to have secured even a niche within the Caribbean common market (CARICOM). CARICOM passed us by, as opportunity to increase our productive capacity. The Birds be damned!
Antigua and Barbuda, governed by the Birds for 35 of the 40 years we have had internal autonomy shows the most severe weaknesses and failures of CARICOM, and none of its successes.
I want to go further. Investment funds in the CARICOM region have been hoarded by Central Banks for allocation by, and often to, the public sector. It is not that the public sector in the region is incapable. It is that it has been incapacitated by ruling politicians from playing the role it should have. Therefore most of the funds invested in the public sector have resulted in dissavings and in Antigua and Barbuda’s case in particular, woeful and irretrievable losses.
The result of all this, is that CARICOM trade was not, and is not, and will not be a large part of over-all trade. It peaked at 14 per cent of overall trade in the CARICOM region in 1989. It has been declining ever since. The truth of the matter is, that the failure to allocate industries and thus expand the productive capacity of CARICOM territories made this inevitable. While the insular habit of licenses and quotas and other trade impediments to intra-regional trade made bad matters worse. So too, was the fact that payments within the region, for goods and services provided within the region, were subject to the same impediments as non-CARICOM third countries. It was an unholy mess. More disintegration than integration.
The result of this was that CARICOM was and is beset, with a sense of arbitrariness, a destruction of confidence, a loss of enterprise and above all, a great reluctance among the brightest to enter productive activities. (It is not an accident that CARICOM has a host of bright consultants without the productive base to support the bright consultants). Indeed, such investments as were undertaken in CARICOM tended to focus on opportunities where they were given a free ride.
I readily admit, that the high levels of regional protection offered by CARICOM did manage to stimulate production for some countries, usually the larger ones, but so inefficiently that the transport costs to a neighbouring CARICOM country would often make the goods uncompetitive with imports from third countries. Antigua and Barbuda falls in this category where CARICOM imports, were often uncompetitive with those of non-CARICOM, third countries. Antigua and Barbuda, therefore baulked, at CARICOM’s Common External Tariff (CET) designed to protect regional production. Antigua had no production to protect. Therefore, it was most reluctant to protect the production of other CARICOM countries, when it could get the same imports cheaper from non-CARICOM countries.
The point of all this detailed economic analysis of CARICOM is that its current rush to a single market and economy does not have the economic base to justify the move to a single market and economy.
Therefore all this free movement of CARICOM skilled persons is decidedly wrong, and even more dead wrong in its prematurity at this stage.
The productive capacity of each CARICOM nation has to be expanded, by CARICOM agreement and implementation, before we can rush to create and implement a superstructural requirement like the free movement of Skilled CARICOM persons.
Places like Antigua and Barbuda, with the best possible will in the world, will become, at best, dumping grounds for CARICOM production, and for the skilled persons of the region by virtue of the fact, that we have no productive base, and being a relatively high income-earning territory, without income tax, we will attract such persons like flies to rotting meat.
Add to this the hard fact that at the highest level of employment in Antigua in the 90’s, that is, in 1992 the total labour force here, was 28,878 of which 7,689, more than 25 per cent, were non-Antiguans. To accentuate that trend is to court disaster.
Free movement of skilled persons, especially graduates, would mean that the top, middle and bottom of the labour force, could easily be dominated by non-Antiguans. (Just as the police force is now. Antigua is the only CARICOM territory which does not produce its own Police Force or even its own Security guards!) What a mess!
PM Lester Bird does not have a clue about developments and trends within CARICOM, or the wider world, and therefore he has no clue as to where Antigua and Barbuda fits in the regional scheme of things or the global scheme of things.
It is not that I have anything personal against Lester Bird. The opposite is true. He and I were great friends who do not now speak to each other, and most likely never will. It is that he is a corrupt political luxury which Antigua and Barbuda cannot afford. Everyday he remains in power is another nail in the coffin of Antigua and Barbuda’s political destiny. That is the long and short of the matter.
Last updated on 14 February 2022