Goodness knows how many times a day I am reminded of V.S. Naipaul’s observation that the Caribbean is doomed precisely because its people have never learned the difference between reality and carnival. Small wonder that the late great writer was as much revered as despised for his bluntness, especially when referencing fellow West Indians. Our own Derek Walcott on more than one occasion marked him “alarmingly venal” and racist.
“Frankness doesn’t absolve him of it,” wrote our own dearly departed Nobel laureate in a review of Naipaul’s The Garden Path, featured in What the Twilight Says. “If Naipaul’s attitude towards Negroes . . . was turned on Jews, for example, how many people would praise him for his frankness? Who would have exalted that ‘honesty’ for which he is praised as our only incorruptible writer from the Third World?”
If there is truth in Walcott’s assertions, still that does not mean his fellow departed genius was totally off base and all of the time prejudiced. In all events I dare to say Naipaul and Walcott saw eye to eye on aspects of West Indian life. What separated them were their respective reactions to what they saw. For instance, Naipaul seems almost to take pleasure from reminding his readers of Michael Swan’s conclusion, reproduced from The Marches of El Dorado: “Tropical people prefer a subsistence and little work to hard work and a higher standard of living.” (Written long before STEP!)
Here is a young Walcott speaking for himself: “We recalled illiteracy for what it was, a defect, not the attribute it is now considered to be by revolutionaries. Language was earned, there was no self-contempt, no vision of revenge . . . Our melodramatic instincts demanded sudden upheavals, and found nothing in the Roman patience of legal reforms. We became infuriated at the banal demands of laborer and peasant. We romanticized the poor. But the last thing which the poor needed was the idealization of their poverty. No play could be paced to the repetitive, untheatrical patience of hunger and unemployment. Hunger produces enervation of will and knows one necessity . . . the empire of hunger includes work that is aimed only at necessities.”
And so we come to John Compton, in some quarters considered a revolutionary, largely because of his 1950s involvement in the local sugarcane plantation disputes. We meet him now as the prime minister delivering his May 26, 1987 budget address before the parliament of Saint Lucia. He is especially concerned about what he describes as “the high cost of public administration” and the vampiric demands for pay increases by the public sector unions. “Since 1979,” he says, “the government of both parties have been attempting to buy industrial peace by borrowing ourselves into bankruptcy, the consequences of which all will suffer.”
In order to buy peace, says the prime minister, “government has met all claims for retroactive payment to all employees, whether monthly or daily paid.” Additionally: “I have discovered a trend which, if not halted, can result in the destruction of the impartiality of the public service as is provided for under the Constitution.”
From his perspective “a public servant enjoys a special and privileged position in our society. His or her appointment is made by an independent commission whose members, once appointed for a fixed term, cannot be removed except for grave misconduct and then, only by special procedures. A public officer is guaranteed employment until retirement or death and can be dismissed only for grave misconduct and after due inquiry. His or her salary is the first charge on the Consolidated Fund. On retirement he or she is entitled to substantial gratuity and to a pension for the rest of his or her life.”
Two years later the same prime minister was still singing the same old song about the increasing cost of governance, including “paying for industrial peace.” His June 1995 budget address started on a familiar, if more desperate note: “The entire public service must also be the subject of an in-depth examination to ensure its function of delivering efficiently the government services to the public, and without being such a burden that it is an impediment to the state. We must do this ourselves—rather than inviting the assistance of the IMF and paying the enormous social costs of such invitation.”
He referenced Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield and Mr. Micawber, just released from debtors’ prison, who offers the story’s hero a piece of advice: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery. The blossom is blighted, the leaf is withered, the god of day goes down upon the dreary scene and—and, in short, you are for ever floored. As I am.”
Compton breaks it down for local consumption: “To earn ten dollars and to spend nine, the result happiness. To earn ten and to spend eleven, the result misery.” Continuing to ignore Mr. Micawber’s advice would create a debt trap, said the prime minister, “and it is hoped all will see this trap and work to avoid it.”
Alas, while every single prime minister after Compton recognized the debt death-trap, not one has ever found the courage to take effective evasive action. Fast forward to 27 February, 2013. Kenny Anthony is addressing the nation on TV. His opening words: “Over the past two days our families and businesses have had to face a measure of disruption in their daily lives and routines.
Our children have not been able to attend their schools because the vast majority of their teachers foretold—four days in advance—they would all fall ill on designated days: Monday and Tuesday of this week. So too did some civil servants, thus disrupting some of the services provided by the government.” A former president of the teachers’ union, he well understood “the passions of the moment.” Nevertheless, Kenny Anthony could not resist laying blame on his predecessor Prime Minister Stephenson King who had “on the onset of turbulent times awarded public servants a 14.5 percent increase for his successor to emulate by agreeing to a similar increase in real terms.” But the issue was not about him or King, he reminded the nation in distress. “The issue is about one thing: the best interests of the people of Saint Lucia.” But has it ever been? I mean, really?
On the remembered occasion Kenny Anthony acknowledged “the situation that confronts us is grave. But while I have spoken about these facts repeatedly there are some who choose to ignore our reality and create the illusion that things are better than we claim.” And what exactly was that reality? By Anthony’s account: an unemployment rate of 24 percent; youth unemployment 45 percent; growth in the economy 0.6 percent. “By the end of March 2013,” the prime minister predicted, “our debt will increase to 78 percent of our GDP.”
For the first time since 1979, he revealed, “the Caribbean Development Bank has included us among a list of seven Caribbean countries with a high and unsustainable debt. This is the environment, this is the economy in which public sector unions have demanded the government of Saint Lucia pay salary increases initially of 16 percent, then 12 percent, later 9.5 percent, and now 6 percent with stipulated conditions.”
This was how Kenny Anthony ended his address of 27 February, 2013: “I appreciate that all parties are tired of the negotiating process. Members of the public service unions are tired, and that is why they became ill. The private sector and our citizens who require government services on a daily basis are anxious for normalcy to return. Our country needs peace and stability at this time, not upheaval.”
The hot seat that Kenny Anthony vacated by popular demand on 6 June, 2016 is today occupied by Allen Chastanet, he having promised the electorate it would no longer be business as usual. It cannot be unreasonable to presume the campaigning Chastanet knew well why “business as usual” could no longer be tolerated. But by all appearances he too has elephant-roomed what all of his predecessors acknowledged was for the taxpayers of Saint Lucia a burden too heavy to bear, even in the best of times: the cost of public administration and the archaic rules that render civil servants far more powerful than their employers and a cut above the private sector that sustains it, thanks to our politicians who are themselves too protective of their jobs to risk angering the public sector unions. And so we continue playing our Sisyphean stone game that we all know must end if we will survive.
More and more each day the management of our destiny slips into the hands of the CSA membership—not those we elected for the particular purpose! We may as well end as we began, with a word from Naipaul, this time as he recalls the Trinidad of his boyhood: “Though we knew that something was wrong with our society, we made no attempt to assess it. Trinidad was too unimportant and we could never be convinced of the value of reading the history of a place which was, as everyone said, only a dot on the map of the world.
Our interest was all in the world outside, the remoter the better; Australia was more important than Venezuela, which we could see on a clear day. Our own past was buried and no one cared to dig it up.” But buried or not, inevitably our past will catch up with us. The more discerning might say, it already has us paying through the nose for our mule-headed stupidity!
