Once again fear rules and we lose

January 30, 2002
By Bukka Rennie

The biggest betrayal of people, in our Caribbean history, has to be the failure of the Panday regime to have transformed or at least to have initiated the process of transforming Caroni and the sugar industry.

We were saying from the very beginning that this regime had to shoulder this responsibility as its historic mission. All social organisations possess an historic responsibility.

When the PNM came in 1956 its historic purpose was a national agenda to rid the society of colonial, social and political infrastructure, to bring home rule, to liberate the education system and later to at least initiate a process of economic transformation.

This it launched with its five-year economic programmes, its policies to facilitate import substitution, its buy local campaigns, and the use of State institutions such as IDC, ADB and DFC to foster local entrepreneurship.

And who profited? Everyone without exception, regardless of creed, colour, race or class!

It is therefore amazing to hear people on the radio talk shows say that the purpose of the PNM was merely to put political power in the hands of Afro-Trinidadians.

And such people lay claim to be knowledgeable and to have an understanding of our history. If that is so, then that understanding of history is the understanding of a simpleton.

The crystallisation of the racial divide in T&T came over the vision for Federation and the Caribbean nation and the benchmark year for all this has to be 1958, the year of the Federal elections.

The proletarian consciousness that was the basis of all the mass movements of the '20s, '30s and '40s could not help but to inform the party in governance of the objective requirement for a Caribbean Federation.

The Indo-Trinidadian population objected for fear of being swallowed up culturally and otherwise as a minuscule minority in the context of this wider framework of some 30 million inhabitants.

They therefore found themselves allying across the region with the anti-federalist sentiments promulgated largely by the backward sections of the Jamaican business class.

The end result was that the vision of Federation and Independence as co-handmaidens of Caribbean transformation was sacrificed on the altar of accommodating "fears" rather than "hopes".

That is exactly why we are where we are today, wallowing in political filth and decrepitude.

But it is precisely this crystallisation of the racial divide that has made the Caroni sugar industry issue such a hot potato and a football for all kinds of political pip-squeaks and peewats.

To a lot of people in the sugar belt, the PNM did not then and does not now possess the moral authority to manage the transformation process in the sugar belt, yet it was the 1994 PNM Government that wrote off a $2 billion debt that had accumulated since the time of the nationalisation of Caroni from Tate & Lyle in the early '70s.

In just six years the Panday regime took Caroni right back to its $2 billion debt-ridden situation and to its absolute dependency once again on the Treasury.

The situation is even more astonishing when one realises that in that very same period of six years (1995-2001) the overall public debt was taken from some $8 billion to $30 billion.

It is ironic that the very people who by all considerations were supposed to be the ones with the moral authority to do what was essential to transform the sugar belt, chose instead to do nothing. Only for "fear" of losing command of their political strongholds across the belt.

Because of "fear" we compromised the proletarian vision of Caribbean unity back in 1958-61 and once again because of "fear" we abandoned the sugar belt wherein Caribbean civilisation was founded.

Fear brings nothing.