Date: Fri 10-Sep-1993
Paper Page: 8
Publication: Weekend Nation
Byline: Gladstone Holder

BARBADIANS will wake up one morning to find they've lost their country. Said by Premier Errol Barrow one Sunday afternoon long ago. Threat or prophecy?

A group of ministers led by the Prime Minister -- the composition is of great significance -- hurriedly visited the Westmoreland Golf Project when the owners grew uneasy at the public disclosure that their alleged permission was not ironclad. The visit expressed reassurance and care. Natives in various parts of the island, sometimes without vital water supplies for days, must wonder why their larger and more immediate anxiety has not been treated with similar concern.

Water is life. The standpipe was an inconvenience we were rapidly moving away from. Now we who used to boast of one of the finest water supply systems in the world are constantly hearing of the need for water on new golf courses. In short, occasional visitors playing games may get priority over the native people. They bring in foreign currency.

A nine-million gallon lake at Westmoreland and five other new courses are a frightening prospect for people living in areas which suffer chronic water shortages. But `frightening' is not adequate when one learns from a more recent Advocate report that the "water to be pumped by the Westmoreland golf course for irrigation is more than three times what was approved by the Barbados Water Authority (BWA) and that the government overrode the BWA's 1989 decision."

Furthermore, this amount of water was strictly for the golf course and not related to the domestic supply for the approximately 360 houses to be built on the development.

Did the Government, or the Government minister whoever he was who in 1989 overrode the BWA's decision believe, as Mr. Evelyn Greaves said recently, that he did not have to accept the advice of his advisers because the law says the Minister gives permission? In Telling Words on August 27 I showed that that concept of untrampelled ministerial power has no legal sanction.

Ten days later the Advocate carried another shocking front page story. Of course, only an unrepentant cynic or a case-hardened police mind would make any connection between the public revelation on the limits of ministerial power and the Advocate's report that "critical files containing applications and permission for the construction of Silicon Caribbean Limited at Maycock's, St. Lucy have vanished."

The Government has not denied it, but the suspicion would only be firmly rooted if similar files held by the Town and Country Planning Department also could not be found.

Such unfunny things have, of course, happened elsewhere. In the United States, files on the Iran-Contra scandal were reportedly shredded. The British Intelligence source Special Office Brief (SOB) claims that judicial documents on the Mansfield case in Britain have also been shredded. We are seeing a civilisation descending into anarchy.

Here we are told that the Treasury is giving up millions of dollars in exchange for the jobs and foreign exchange that golf promises to bring. THE NATION published the full details. Westmoreland promises 200-300 construction jobs over the next eight to ten years with a spin-off of possibly 1 000 more.

The Government evidently considers this piffling promise a great catch. President Ronald Reagan boasted of 19 million new jobs during his eight-year term but these were mainly at the low end of the scale and it did not prevent his country from sinking into recession. We ought to be asking who stand to benefit from the golf courses and who will be hurt.

Nearly 4 000 acres in golf courses mean less land for housing the indigent natives. Not one of the thousands agonisingly waiting for houses for years will be accommodated in those projected for the golf courses.

An even as the Government gives up millions of dollars in concessions to the golf developers, it more than doubles the rent in its housing estates to low-income earners, many of whom no longer have any income because of the Government's gross mismanagement of the country's finances.

Now we can look forward to street people sleeping in the open air and cadging food from garbage cans. Meanwhile the Government hopes to fool the gullible by lowering oil prices, by far the highest in the entire Caribbean, despite the fact that we supply one-third of our oil needs.

Extravagant concessions to foreign groups -- they are called investors -- are a feature of this administration. Even as this country went in a financial tail spin to the IMF, the PM saw fit to waive the transfer taxes to which this country was entitled from the sale of its assets in BET and the Flour Mill.

The sale was so urgent that Barbadians overseas with their foreign currency could not be accommodated. He was as extravagant when in an early Budget he made it possible for Mobil to reap some $5 million more in profit than it would ordinarily have got.

Yet this week the PM declared that "we (Government) are not in the business of giving away government (he means the people's) assets." He was content to give away the legitimate taxes on the giveaways. Yet in talking about VAT the new Finance Minister was bold enough to say: "the object is not to lose any revenue." He probably meant none that cold be squeezed out of locals. For unless VAT is done with great compassion, it is going to make the poor and the hungry even worse off. Why this more liberal treatment of foreigners than of the native people? Let us not even recount the methods by which local manufacturers were destroyed.

In 1989 which the PM boasts of as his peak year, I wrote an article on the Trade Confirmers debacle. I used the analogy of the Barlow Clowes case in which British nationals had lost their money. There the High Court adjudged the government to have had a duty to warn investors about Barlow Clowes. Could not, I asked, a case be made for the investors in Trade Confirmers on similar grounds so that they might retrieve some of their losses? These were people, some old, who had unwisely invested their savings and lost everything.

The Government has done nothing. Even the Commission's report seems unobtainable. Does this suggest a selective compassion for the rich over the poor, for the foreign over the native investor? But who in this country would rush to support natives? The very term is derogatory if you have been miseducated or educated beyond your capacity to think. Concessions and accommodation are for the strangers within our gates.

And when the golf courses, hotels and houses are built, the old walls will have gone up again and the natives will be outside the gates. And many would learn by chastening experience, that history repeats itself. Old people who knew Belleville, Strathclyde and Hastings will shake their heads sadly at the regression to the unofficial apartheid that was once the Barbadian singularity and at the betrayal of some valiant fighters on the frontiers of social progress.

It is a curious paean of praise that in a clearly unintended slander, Dr. Waldo Ramsey should liken our PM to Machiavelli, that most cynical and amoral of political philosophers who applauded expediency and deceit in order to secure the goals of the ruler.

Any discerning person would, like Dr. Ramsay, recognise Mr. Sandiford's "manifest cleverness and statecraft since he assumed office as Prime Minister." But Machiavelli, I thought would be singular in openly exalting the success of a leader in clinging to office while the country foundered.

The preferential option for the poor which was the slogan of liberation theology has been turned into a preferential option for the rich from abroad. It is the funniest of ironies that the plantation system which our new rulers railed against so vehemently, far from being demolished, is showing signs of flourishing like the green bay tree. We have gone one worst than our post-independence cousins in Africa.