Greetings.

In my last commentary, I tried to make the point that in order to achieve its true potential, a country needs to be guided by a common vision.

Different people and different organizations may have different opinions with regard to priorities as to how the country should be governed, as to who should or shouldn’t govern, as to how we should live, etc..But with all of that, there really has to be one common, overarching mission, A VISION.

And in order to fulfil and achieve that VISION, we have to prevent ourselves from being paralysed by DIVISION. The bigger picture must always prevail over the smaller picture. The common good must always trump personal or partisan interests, and if we cannot break out of the chains of selfishness and or political partisanship, then we can, and will, never find and work towards our common good and national vision.

We, the people, cannot allow one EGO  to determine where we Go.

Sometimes you can get a glimpse of a country’s vision by looking at its motto.

Antigua & Barbuda’s motto is ‘Each Endeavouring, All Achieving’.

The Bahamas’ motto is ‘ Forward, Upward, Onward Together’.

Barbados’ motto is ‘Pride and Industry’.

Cuba’s motto is ‘Fatherland or Death’.

Dominica’s motto is ‘After God, the Earth’. This motto represents perhaps the fundamental philosophy of Dominica’s original inhabitants whose culture is built around respect and love for Superior Spiritual Power and for Mother Earth. I really love it.

Grenada’s motto is ‘Ever Conscious of God, We Aspire and Advance as One People’.

Guyana’s motto is ‘One People, One Nation, One Destiny’.

Haiti’s motto is ‘ Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’.

Jamaica’s motto is ‘Out of Many, One People’.

St.Lucia’s motto is ‘The Land, The People, The Light’.

SVG’s motto is ‘Peace & Justice’

Trinidad and Tobago’s motto is ‘Together We Aspire, Together We Achieve’, and

SKN’s motto is ‘Country Above Self’

All of these mottos represent the Vision for the conduct of the affairs of each of our countries and prescribe for us the mentality which we must adopt in order to achieve that Vision.

Ask yourselves for a moment which of our countries in the region is living up to its motto.

Are we in SKN living according to the clarion call to put Country Above Self? Is Guyana really behaving like it’s one nation, one people? Are Trinidadians & Tobagonians aspiring and achieving TOGETHER? SVG says Peace and Justice…. really?

I would love it if we in SKN put Country Above Self, and if Dominicans  put God first, then the Earth, and if Barbadians  live Pride and Industry, if Haitians embrace Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and if Bahamians live Forward, Onward, Upward TOGETHER.

I would love it if the people of each country were to live not only to our own national motto, but, better still, for us to also live to the mottos of all of the other countries in the region.

If we encourage, teach and guide our people to this mentality, from a tender age to adulthood and through life, we will be better persons, better citizens, and we will have better countries, more efficient, transparent and professional governance, more proactive citizenship involvement in the affairs of the country, and a better, more developed, more effective,  and more sustainably prosperous region which will command greater respect and enjoy better leverage in determining its own destiny  on the global stage.

And it is in the spirit of all of the national mottos of the region that I now share with you some of my Vision for SKN, and, indeed, for the region.

For me, the most important matters in no specific order of priority, are:

• protecting and stabilizing our environment, especially in these perilous times of climate change; let us work tirelessly to eradicate the toxins from our land, air and sea;
• establishing a sustainable organic food production and processing plan that would ensure healthier diets among or people while improving the professionalism and increasing the prosperity of our farming sector, and, in the process, significantly reducing the hundreds of millions of dollars that leak out of our economy annually on imported food, plus saving local consumers millions upon millions of dollars on duty annually;
• providing an efficient, modern health system with universal health insurance, and with the government owning and operating at its hospitals critical equipment for testing patients and for carrying out medical protocols;
• establishing an education system that focuses on the rounded academic, technical, psychological and social development of the child as a Caribbean person and at the same time a citizen of the world; it includes  the development of his or her hard and soft skills, and, in essence, a system which builds balanced, well rounded, conscious, conscionable, and responsible  citizens and institutions; the education system has to excite our children about their history, about the sciences,  technology, entrepreneurship, languages, the arts ( music, poetry, prose, dance, acting, painting, sculpture, etc; we have to produce thinkers, not regurgitators; we must be taught to be responsible, and to be independent-minded but to be team players, to be tolerant and respectful of differences on opinion, we must be taught how to value life, time and humanity and Mother Nature, and we must be taught to act and treat each other with dignity, to be our brother’s and sister’s keeper and to do unto others as we would have them do unto us; and our education must come, not only from the schools, but from the homes, the social organizations, the workplace, etc.;
• creating and sustaining a professionalized, depoliticized, properly remunerated and rewarded, independent  public service;
• introducing a system in which all workers, in both the public and private sectors, are  part of a contributory pension plan separate and apart from Social Security, so if you’re working for Company X in Basseterre from the age of, say, 25 until 45-50, you can retire, and get a pension, move on to another job or open a business, or just cool out, and when you reach SSB retirement age, you are getting two pensions; while you’re working at that first job, you can borrow money from your pension plan to add a wing to your house, to send off a child to study, etc., etc. So between your first retirement and your second, you have something to live for, rather than waste away your time feeling down on yourself between the ages of 45 and 65, when you have a lot to offer to society;
• ending this culture of entitlement and dependency that was nurtured among our people after independence, a time when our leaders should have been imbuing the people with the spirit of a strong work ethic, a spirit of independence, and a spirit of self esteem;
• protecting workers, small businesses, and consumers and ensuring that they have a fair shake in the workplace and in the market;
• ending corruption in both the public and private sectors, and collusion between politicians and big business, and between politicians and their cronies ( square pegs cannot fit in round holes in terms of ability, training, skills and attitude, and government cannot be used as a job dumping ground for political supporters who cannot survive unless they are holding on to their representatives’ coat tails- the solution to this is to educate and train them and help them to think and act for themselves, sever the coat-tail connection, and we’re good to go), all of that stuff has to be stamped out. Transparency and accountability have to be the order of the day, and the people, through appropriately structured and implemented legislation, regulations and practices, must have easy access to government information; it has been estimated that corruption in these islands accounts for about 30% of the cost of running the Government. So if it costs $900 million a year to run your country with corruption going on and you can cut out that corruption, it will now cost $630 million to run the country. That represents a savings of $270 million for taxpayers; it will also position the government to reduce and remove taxes, because it costs so much less now that the corruption is gone; this means that the people will now have  more spending power, which translates into greater economic activity and increased government revenues; and in such circumstances, with the corruption gone, the government will be run more efficiently, and that is better for the country; with regard to corruption, it needs to be understood that conflict of interest, unjust enrichment and other forms of corruption also exist among public servants who are not politicians; it’s not just politicians;
• establishing a smart 50-year, maybe a 100-year air, land and sea use management and overall national development plan needs to be introduced and implemented, to address the issues of housing and town planning, commercial space, public spaces, transportation, manufacturing and processing, safety of food, water and renewable, fossil-free energy, technology, research and development; all utilities must be majority owned by the public sector with 49% of the shares in the utility companies to be offered to the people of the country; and the national economy needs to be diversified  (there are interesting opportunities in research and development medicinal plants, the entertainment industry, etc., etc.);
• my Vision calls for an end to the Queen of England being our Head of State;
• effecting constitutional, electoral reform and parliamentary reform where we have prime ministerial elections, and legislative elections separately, like the USA. Whoever is elected prime minister can appoint his or her Cabinet, after successful screening by an independent body; and we would have an independent Electoral Apparatus, and fixed date elections, etc., and the Prime Minister will have less powers than he has right now; voters will have the right of recall of representatives whom are under performing; and the government owned media would be fairly open to all voices and views;
• implementing social security reform, which would be essentially to follow the recommendations that have been coming forward from actuarial reports over the years: cut administrative costs, change the law to broaden the scope of SSB’s ability to invest, reduce the land assets in its portfolio, increase the retirement age, increase the deductions, etc.;
• putting a regulatory framework to oversee the operations and activities of our Development Bank which, like its counterparts in the sub-region, does not fall under the oversight of the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank;
• keeping our islands tidy, and clean, for our people to stop littering and vandalizing, to walk in the Square or any other public space on the walkways provided rather than trampling on the grass. You wouldn’t do it in England or America, but you want to do it in what Marcus Garvey described to your grandparents here in SKB in 1937 as your own “Garden of Eden”;
• encouraging our young men to stop wearing their pants down below their bums, exposing their underwear; we want their brains and goodness to be exposed, not their backsides;
• ending the nuisance of blasting sound systems in vehicles, shops and other purveyors of services and goods around Basseterre and elsewhere;
• introducing a more humane penal system.

While I can go on and on, I will end by saying, first, that my Vision calls for us to be a happy, efficient,  tolerant, dignified, cultured, orderly and truly democratic societies whose affairs are driven by a Vision for the common good, no longer allowing ourselves to be divided, manipulated and ruled by self serving politicians and other leaders, and, second, by referring to two quotes from Mr. Marcus Mosiah Garvey :(i) “Intelligence rules the world, ignorance carries the burden”; and (ii) “The man who is not able to develop and use his mind is bound to be the slave of the other man who develops and uses his mind”;

WHAT’S YOUR VISION FOR YOUR COUNTRY? WHAT’S YOUR VISION FOR YOUR CHILDREN AND GRAND CHILDREN AND FOR GENERATIONS TO COME? WHAT’S YOUR VISION FOR OUR CARIBBEAN?

THEN, MORE IMPORTANTLY, WHAT’S OUR VISION FOR OUR COUNTRY, AND WHAT’S OUR VISION FOR OUR CARIBBEAN?