If You Wish To Stand On The Shoulders of Giants, One Must Have Giants.

Whenever I get an email from Errol Hewitt, I feel like I got a message from someone who knows what is going on. Someone who has a grip on reality where others let go. And yesterday, I got one such email from him - pointing me at his article, 'The way forward ... back to basics'. While written in the context of Jamaica, it resonates in the context of the Caribbean that I know - and the Caribbean Errol knows as well.

...At the centre of any national development strategy and inescapably so, must be the reduction of poverty and the improvement of the quality of life of all our people. These are inseparable imbedded goals in any worthwhile and serious development effort. It is also obvious that promoting broad-based development is an essential prerequisite to tackle poverty and the pathway of development has to be planned and guided in order to ensure the required focus, efficiency, cost effectiveness and critically, civic society's input and thereby, support. Poverty, like development, is pervasive and has to be addressed as such in all geographic areas and sectors of the economy...

Reduction of poverty. Improvement of quality of life. I think of Olivier Moreau (Martinique) at the last CARDICIS meeting, where he and I were literally pounding our fists on the table calling for sustainable development - and if Errol could have made it, we would have had 3 upset people. Everyone has a monopoly on their perspectives, few take the longer view toward the horizon and the broader view that encompasses a larger strategy which has an unmistakable grounding in causality - which, if you involve people, falls into categories that are broadly classed as ownership and empowerment. Lofty words, those.

A lot of people simply would like to eat, have clothing and electricity and running water. Almost everyone in the Caribbean has a mobile phone at this point, but running water and electricity remain great challenges.

Sir Isaac Newton once said that if he saw further, he could because he stood on the shoulders of giants.¹ But to stand on those shoulders, one must have giants. While I could focus on the lack of a public domain to lend shoulders to the Caribbean, or other Global Challenges of the Caribbean, the real issue is that the Caribbean doesn't grow giants - it exports them. This is called brain drain in certain circles, and if this is true, then a good question would be 'who is running the country'?

Part of building giants, as Errol wrote, is education. It's infrastructure. It's about giving people a chance to have an effect on the economy of not only the nation that they are in, but the global economy, and upon building the relationship with the global economy, leveraging it to their benefit. It's not about welfare states, where people are not given opportunity but are given just enough to keep them strung out on hope.

Idealistic ideas. Ideal. Idea. Coincidence? No, vision. There are people in the region with a vision - a collection of independently created visions which call for the same things, which simply make sense. But these people have little or no effect on policy because the people who wield policy like a shield are afraid of incisive observation; where the rapiers of common sense are not strong enough to beat down the shield, but are fast enough to poke the wielders now and then. Increasingly, public awareness is coming into play, and that needs to continue... but that awareness cannot be the recreated sound bytes of those with the shield.

The Caribbean has enough politicians, what it needs are... giants. Leaders instead of people known for abusing the trust of the masses. And those leaders have to be started from within the coming generations, else any dreams of developed nation status will simply be the hubris of bureaucrats and politicians who speak a lot, but do not one concrete thing to increase the quality of life of those that unwittingly empower them. When these politicians retire - and would that many of them had a decade ago - who will replace them? Will it be those that they choose, or those that the public needs to assure the welfare of the citizenry?

The Caribbean needs the giants to have the shoulders to stand upon. I hope Errol writes more, because what he wrote needs to be scribbled on the walls next to signs like the ones in the image to the left, obscurely describing the illusions of politicians which can only be dispelled by recognizing reality.

Image at top is the work of itzpapalotl, and is under a Creative Commons License.

¹ This is sometimes incorrectly attributed to Thomas Edison, who may well have said it though he is not the first.