MIA > Archive > Tim Hector
Fan the Flame, Outlet, 30 May 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.
PM Lester Bird made a speech at the ground-breaking ceremony for the so-called new hospital.
The Prime Minister noted that the United Progressive Party in its 1994 Manifesto had pledged to “establish a new 200 bed, modern hospital as the flagship of a hew health care system which will provide the best health care to Antigua and Barbuda and to the sub-region.”
PM Lester Bird then went on to say this, that the other party, the ALP, pledged in its 1994 manifesto that “it will solicit architectural drawings for the building of a new general hospital”. PM Lester Bird then went on to say that the ALP manifesto said that “A site has already been identified.”
Now it is clear, to anyone who thinks, an exercise which I have never known Lester Bird to be capable of, that the Michael’s Mount site was selected long before the elections, as the site for the new hospital. The rip-off was long planned.
The sheer thievery involved, of buying Michael’s Mount, its 9 acres of land, for $13.5 million, was long contemplated by the ALP or its leaders or leader. Therefore it is obvious that the robbery of the nation was long calculated carefully calibrated, and wilfully executed. So is the $101 million Hospital un-economic and out of sync with our real needs and possibilities. It meets Stanford’s needs, not Antigua & Barbuda’s.
It is my view, that whenever there is a change of government this Michael’s Mount site for $13.5 million should be thoroughly investigated and the guilty brought to justice. Note I said it is my view. It is not UPP’s view. It is mine. So too the entire scheme should be examined for money-laundering and money siphoning.
PM Lester Bird is a vulgar man without a trace of national self-respect. He will do anything. Get involved in any scheme, however base. He is not half as good as his father. Or to put it more correctly, he is twice as bad as his father.
V.C. Bird would have had the honesty to say that the opposition was not objecting to the new hospital. What the UPP is objecting to and will continue to object to, is the $13.5 million for the 9 acres of land at Michael’s Mount. Lester wasn’t even half decent enough to concede this. The UPP is objecting to both the humongous $101 million price and the Michael’s Mount site itself. Antigua and Barbuda will have to pay a further $4 million just to demolish the abandoned hotel. UPP objects to that too. UPP had planned to buy the Michael’s Mount site. Refurbish it. Then assemble a team of local persons to manage and operate the new hotel, with the workers as shareholders. UPP would have asked that the new hotel become a major conference centre, for local and regional non-government organisations. Incidentally, UPP sees a great deal of the future of Antigua and Barbuda, and more so the Caribbean as being tied to non-government organisations.
UPP looks forward to the time, when at the start of a new financial year, government will sit down with a number of non-government organisations and draw up the plan of implementation arising out of a truly national 10 year development plan.
To be precise, UPP intends to revolutionise national planning, by making it truly national. It has never been attempted before. Non-government organisations would have their plans. A UPP government would see it as its responsibility to help projects, and where necessary UPP would guarantee soft loans to non-government organisations. Non-government organisations would be responsible to keep and make a UPP government accountable. In turn a UPP government would rely on non-government organisations to carry out local development in an equally accountable manner. Civil Society would thus have power to resist excesses by the State. Civil Society, over time, would take power from the state, and make power social, and not a power over society.
In strict terms, a UPP government does not want to be involved directly in enterprise development, except where no other organisation local or foreign, is capable or willing. Foreign investment would have its area. Local investment its area. The government supervises the National Plan. So every year there is a review of the national plan, with the non-government organisations and local councils. The Proceedings would be telecast and broadcast. Note well, foreign owned enterprises, would take part in this national plan as well. So all the nonsense about UPP not wanting foreign investment ought to be laid to rest.
Instead of foreign investment being quiet and absentee, it would now have a voice in national planning, economic and social planning.
In case, Lester Bird has not got the point, UPP proposes to bring the society, Government and Civil Society, that is non-government organisations to be in full charge of the Nation. That is a revolution. If UPP succeeds we would have created a model for the Caribbean; laid the basis of Caribbean unity; and at the same time, creating a model for Africa and Latin America. Incidentally, we would have deepened the idea of democracy, by creating the opening for society to participate at the level of planning and implementation in its own development.
We would have entered the new millennium not as mendicants, but as an example. An example of new possibilities. Incidentally too, UPP would expect Trade Unions, all of them, to become involved in creating enterprises for its members. And thus go beyond the wage-earning and conditions of work for wage-earners.
The Church, UPP would expect to be primarily involved in the social sector. So the new hospital UPP proposed, the Church which has international connections with hospitals, would have played a leading role from planning to implementation.
Now I am going to return to Lester’s speech having given a sneak preview of UPP’s Charter for the New Millennium.
Here is what Lester Bird had to say, referring, I suppose, to Tim Hector and UPP he said “this is a group that everyday tries to fool the people of this country into the mistaken belief that we have all the resources we need to finance our own development.”
Lester and his speech writer no doubt thought they were very wise when he uttered this statement. It is of course, grounded in nothing. It is grounded in neither philosophy or development let alone past or current history. Who financed Japan’s development? Or Singapore’s? Those questions they never ask and will never answer. For they are most ignorant of what they are most assured. No one that I know is more un-schooled in theories of development than Lester Bird. He reads absolutely nothing. I tried between 1969–1975 to get him to read. He would not. He is at best an advocate. People tell him what to think, and then he brings to the advocacy of those thoughts a verbosity of such force that listeners would think the thought originated with him. Not so at all. Note I am being charitable, Lester Bird is an advocate, a verbose one even, but not a thinker of any kind. He fools himself with the words and thoughts of others.
Now I will bring someone to refute Lester Bird about financing our own development. Then I will bring Lester Bird himself to contradict himself on the same question of financing our own development.
The person, the authority, I shall call upon is none other than Sir Arthur Lewis, easily one of the great economists of the 20th century. This is what Sir Arthur Lewis had to say:
“The opinion that the West Indies can raise all the capital it needs from its own resources is bound to shock many people, because West Indians like to feel ours is a poor community. But the fact of the matter is, that at least half of the people in the world are poorer than we are. The standard of living in the West Indies is higher than the standard of living in India or China, in most of the countries of Asia and in most of the countries of Africa. The West Indies is not a poor community, it is in the upper bracket of world income. It is capable of producing the extra 5 or 6 percent of resources which is required for this job. Just as Sri Lanka and Ghana are finding the money they need for development by taxing themselves so can we. It is not necessary for us to send our statesmen around the world begging for help. If help is given to us let us accept it, but let us not sit down and say nothing can be done until the rest of the world out of its goodness of heart is willing to grant us charity.”
Calling on Sir Arthur Lewis to so comprehensively demolish Lester Bird’s nonsense was equivalent to using a sledgehammer to swat a fly. But it had to be done. Lester asked to be sledge hammered.
From the time I read that quotation from Sir Arthur Lewis in 1960, it has remained an article of faith with me. It conditions everything I say, and do not say about politics and economics here and in the region.
So I hope we have buried this nonsensical notion once and for all, that we always have to look outside of ourselves to get anything done. With a truly national approach, one in which government and non-government organisations participate, we can raise the 5 or 6 percent of gross national product needed for sustained and sustainable economic development, and not just by taxes, but by national capital accumulation.
Now I will refer to Lester Bird himself, to get he himself to refute, and refute absolutely, his own spoken word on May 20, that it “is a mistaken belief that we have all the resources we need to finance our own development.”
This year alone, 1997, Antigua and Barbuda, under Lester Bird, will pay $72 million or 20 percent of its revenue, to pay back for foreign debts. All of this money was expended on un-economic projects. Most of these un-economic projects were initiated by Lester Bird himself. All of them, Royal Antiguan, Heritage Quay, Marina Bay, the numerous factories in the Coolidge Industrial Park, which have all collapsed, we are paying for, with no prospect of a profitable return. It is simply money down the drain.
Consider for a moment if every year Antigua and Barbuda, through the government alone, raised $72 million which would have been invested by non-government organisations and individuals for the last 15 years. Imagine then where we would have been now! But that is time past. And time past is one of the four things, which, like a sped arrow, the spoken word, and lost opportunity, come not back. Our resources for development were all wasted by Lester Bird, on un-economic projects, all of which were riddled with corruption. History will not forgive him. It will crucify him. Of that I am certain. As certain as the sun rises, and all the rivers runs down to the sea.
But it cannot be refuted that the $72 million we are paying now for uneconomic projects if invested as our own financial resources in economic projects would have put Antigua & Barbuda on a sound economic footing. Lester Bird refutes and attacks himself.
Now I want to quote one of the most difficult economists in the world, but one of the best. He never says what people want him to say. He says precisely what he wants to say in his own special language. For he is a poet expressing himself in economics. He is, of course, Lloyd Best.
He wrote, matter-of-factly, this most profound statement about both Caribbean history and economics. “Since the American War of Independence,” wrote Lloyd Best, “brought the Golden Age of the West Indies to a close, the economy has needed a thorough overhaul.”
So from 1776, more particularly, from the end of the 18th century to the present, the Caribbean economy, separately and collectively, has needed an overhaul.
Put another way, for two centuries, in terms of economics, we have been spinning top in mud. The Planters knew it. They spent the time trying to exact more and more preferential treatment from the Colonial Power, trying to hold on. When they got less and less preferential treatment they packed up and left the Caribbean without a fight. They simply left. There was nothing to fight for. The plantation as an economic institution, was an outmoded form of economic organisation. The Planters abandoned ship.
We here allow Bird and Birdism to fool us into believing there was some Struggle and some conquest. Conquest of what? The lands? We did nothing, nothing at all with the lands! This has to be historically corrected. Did we conquer political power? Yes. The lands the planters abandoned. But political power we gained and did nothing with it, except enrich a single family and foreigners, and here and there, within the last twenty years one or two politicians pocketed some loot. Otherwise we did nothing with political power.
The premise for free secondary education was laid under colonialism with free primary education. We carried on where the colonials left off with the same educational system, so that now our own children are finding the education boring. They have little or no motivation to learn. You dear reader, can doubt that all you want, but survey children other than your own and you will find the malaise. The malaise is not in our children, but in the wooden, deadening, con-by-rote regimentation we have imposed on them, calling it education. Change is more than a century overdue.
But let me continue with Lloyd Best. Lloyd Best says that since the American War of Independence brought our Golden Age to a close, that is, the time when Europe fought bitter and brutish wars over the Caribbean, and when every war had as its prize a Caribbean slave colony, since then the Caribbean needed to change. Change what? Best says:
“We have been required to displace the wholly dis-embedded, externally-propelled, excessively export specialised economy.”
And we needed to replace this “by one which would be more localised, embedded in social and political control, and residentiary, in the sense of being programmed to respond to the needs of the home population, even while being small, and necessarily open, and still effectively a specialised exporter.”
That I will tell you is Best at his best. But Best is even better when he wrote:
“Not until, we become aware of the nature of the challenge will we be in a position to develop the confidence to embark on a programme of import displacement to supply ourselves with a slate of differentiated outputs, the only real source of comparative advantage and therefore of exports.”
You must grasp this idea of import displacement. It is not the same as import substitution. It means developing a product locally, which displaces imports. Like say, developing Amaranth as a breakfast cereal, heightening nutrition and stimulating regional and world demand. Or say, packaged West Indian soups, displacing similar imports, but with an all-natural as opposed to artificial component. Or fish-cakes as a fast-food. Got the point?
Best is remorseless. He wrote:
“If we cannot imagine something we could produce and sell to ourselves in the open economy [that is in a market-place without protective tariffs] then we will remain commodity [and one-service, tourism] exporters, the most pathetic of mendicants.”
The most pathetic of mendicants. It describes Lester in part. But only in part. He has sunk lower than a mendicant. He is now giving away the national patrimony for less than a mess of pottage.
I am going to digress, but digress on the point. When I went to India in the late 70’s and 80’s I was astonished. I grew up with the push-cart Porters here made carts to transport goods. First they used ball-wheels on a flat bed, pulled by a rope. Then larger carts, with car tyres, and pulled by up-standing handle, by a man. In India, they had motorised these carts themselves, using a vespa type engine, both for human transport and the transport of goods. Our technological development in this field was check-mated. We did not develop our own motorised vehicle. Instead we went to the truck, imported of course.
I am confident though, that we could produce a solar-powered vehicle which would move us as public transport, as well as moving goods. I believe the whole field of solar energy is wide open to us, but only if we “overhaul” our economies as Best put it.
Only too if Best realises that we cannot and will not produce a bourgeoisie here which will undertake the industrialisation of these island-states. To produce such a class would take us another century.
For we are called upon at this stage to replace and displace not just imports, but the very reason we were imported here – to be wageless workers (slaves) or wage-earners. It is the wage-earner we must now abolish. That I concede is the most radical of radical ideas. It is mine, I hasten to add, not UPP’s.
Let me briefly explain. Any real comparative advantage we can gain in the market place can only come about from the worker. In terms of Capital, multi-nationals have more of it than we will ever have. In terms of technology we are way behind. In neither Capital or technology can we compete and win.
It is in terms of work and the organisation of work that we can score. We can make our workers part of the enterprise. Their rewards are dependent, not just on output, but on the general performance of the enterprise. That is, they share in the profits. The workers have to be educated as to their external competitors, and what they have to do to go beyond in order to survive in the marketplace. Intellectuals with management skills, with technical skills have to join in this, not as overlords, but as partners with the workers and farmers. The worker has to raise the productivity of labour, by training and by participating in deciding on quotas and the fulfillment of their own self-determined goals.
I have said enough, but by no means all that I know on this subject.
What I am writing about does not occur at all to Lester Bird. Innovation is not in or on his mind. The challenge of history, that for two hundred years, our economies needed overhauling, but we have ducked the challenge of history, Lester and his speech-writers know nothing about. Nothing at all.
All they know is how to set up another Tourist Plantation, as a State within a State. That is why we have this Guana-Island State within a State. To Dato Tan, Lester Bird gives away the islands, Guana Island, Great Bird Island, Red-Head Island, Lobster Island, Crump Island, Galley Island, Exchange Island, Hawes Island, Pelican Island, Crump Island and Laviscount Island, not because anything inherent in the project is best suited to these islands. It is because Dato Tan wants a separate state within the state of Antigua for his Asian Village State. It is a wholly ridiculous proposition. It makes sense only to Lester Bird, who believes we are capable of nothing, nothing except being pawns in other people’s chess games. I, for one, am inalterably opposed to any State within a State, and in the end, we are even more dependent on the State within than on our own.
To be sure, I have outlined, however, briefly, a new organisation of work, with new production relations which will give rise to new social relations in a truly national economy. Non-government organisations become the centre of development, but new relations between management and worker, worker and enterprise, with the workers having a stake and a say make possible a new economy, capable of producing goods for the regional market and the world market at one and the same time.
Last updated on 30 May 2022