Delivering the goods

Feb 24, 2010 Editorial

Now that we may be possibly resting after the labours of celebrating our Republic’s 40th Anniversary via Mashramani gyrations, hopefully we can spare a thought or two about the Republic itself. Long gone are the euphoric days of 1970 when we severed all ties with Britain: we were now masters of our fate; captains of our destiny. Our belief that our poverty had been directly caused by the rapaciousness of the colonisers over the course of their hundreds of years of rule was not unreasonable. Evidently what was unreasonable was the expectation that happy days would ineluctably be ushered in.
This is not to say that the leaders that guided us into Republican status were naïve romantics. If the truth be told they were rather open-eyed about the treacherous neo-colonial road that lay ahead under the new dispensation. One problem, however, was that the leaders were inherently compromised in their choice of a truly republican status (meaning taking only the interests of the republic into consideration) by the decisions they had made to secure the governance of our country.
Take, for instance, the decision to nationalise the “commanding heights of the economy” starting with the bauxite industry in 1971 to the sugar industry in 1976 when almost 80% of the economy was in the hands of the state. If the belief that we were being drained of our wealth by the foreign corporations acting under the aegis of the colonial state was correct, then there was every justification for taking over those corporations. In theory at least, the wealth would now remain in our country – to be deployed for our augmented development. A virtuous circle would be initiated.
However the need not to antagonise the US (which had installed the new government into office through the machinations of their CIA) forced the government to offer terms of compensation, and continued relationships, to the foreign companies that eventually proved to be millstones that helped to sink those companies.
It was not surprising that even after the putatively radical measures of “nationalisation”, aid continued to be poured in from the US and the IMF/World Bank (International financial institutions – IFIs) that it controlled. There was more than one way to skin a cat and as became apparent before the end of the 70’s, more than one way to control a so-called “republican” state. One could not run with the hares and hunt with the hounds and not expect to be stymied in the end. The chains of debt proved to be even more powerful than the direct rule of imperialism. We are still faced with the same dilemma today.
After the spectacular failure of our effort to become independent and self-sufficient through our co-operative socialistic efforts, the debt that we had been plied with had piled up to such an extent that our leaders decided we just could not service it. Our credit ratings were shot and as interest accumulated to double our outstanding debt to US$2.1 billion, the circle was completed in 1989 when the PNC government decided to re-enter an agreement with the IFIs. As part of the conditionalities to obtain new debt (and write off the old ones – which, in any case, the banks had long written off their own books) we had to agree to all the old relationships that we had previously denounced as “exploitative” in 1970.
Dubbed the “Washington Consensus”, we are not sure why it was thought that the conditionalities of “privatisation, liberalisation and stabilisation” would fundamentally change our conditions for the realisation of an independent republican status. The conditions, after all, were designed to integrate us into a world system in which the dominant relationships, by and large, were already established. Unlike us, global giants like China, India and Brazil might be able to manoeuvre successfully because their mass endowed them with options denied to a micro-state like ours.
The example of the few successful smaller states such as Singapore demonstrate that the state will have to play a much more interventionary role in the economy than it has up to now under the new dispensation, if they are to deliver the goods promised by republican status.

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