Time To Make
Our Way in the World

15, Mar 1999
The Bible's admonition to take up your bed and walk is indeed inspired. Take responsibility for yourselves because you are your own "centre" is the implicit logic of that divine admonition. That is all you really need to know.

After all the analyses have been done, all the observations have been made and assessed and classified or categorised, after all the prognoses and predications and prescriptions for the future have been outlined, we have to summon all our native wit, intelligence and courage to take full responsibility for our affairs and make our own way in the world. The problem is that we always seem unable or incapable of commanding ourselves to take up the bed and walk.

There always has to be a Benny Hinn, some outside element, to marshal the stirrings of our hearts and our souls. We are always awaiting Benny Hinns in various forms and parameters.

Would 100,000 citizens of TT, in a normal situation, throng together anywhere to decide on a reconstituting of our society and on a new political-economic direction? Isn't the problem with "bananas" and "cricket" and everything else the self-same damn problem? Will we still be looking for "preferential treatment" and favoured markets come the year 2000?

Can't we see that the issue of bananas, so crucial to the economic stability of the Windwards, that has now reached to the point of open trade war between the USA and the European Union, would eventually destroy the last vestiges of seeming Caribbean integration unless we stand up and break away from the old paradigms? Can't we see that the answer to the banana issue is the Caribbean nation, providing for our own internal regional market needs first and foremost and then dealing with the rest of the world as one force in command of diverse, multi-faceted options? Playing the EU against the USA is only a short-term palliative, not a solution to anything.

And in like manner, is the problem with West Indian cricket the fact that Lara, the captain, is a spoilt brat according to Holding and must be fired to await the crowning of a different messiah? Are five LBW dismissals in one inning the result of Lara's supposed indiscretions and/or failure to socialise with the team off the field? Or is it all about the patent lack of technical development?

Like Holding we seem not to know and seem to wish to wander forever in a state of idyllic, infantile idiocy. In the past, the raw diamonds of West Indian cricket were polished in professional county cricket in England where they played cricket almost every day for an entire season.

To make the West Indies Test team you had to be a county cricket professional. There was no such written law, but it was the fact. Holding was one of the few exceptions.

By limiting county clubs to one foreign player, England has effectively stymied the technical development of West Indian raw talent. Our cricket board even then did not take up their bed and walk. They never created anything to provide the requirement. The Busta Cup is by no means a substitute to playing professionally every day under proper modern management.

So we await miracles and messiahs for the production of technically sound players, while in the meantime we cast blame willy-nilly and threaten players with "management appraisals."

All that will prove to be an exercise in futility, although we may win some games, in the absence of a scientific training structure, manned by past West Indian greats, and which embodies technical development of players from cradle to grave.

Whether it be sport, politics or economics, we continue to exhibit the same basic failing. We do not trust native wit and intelligence and so are incapable of implementing and maintaining structures that will allow us to take full responsibility for our affairs. We keep looking for Columbus and their "doom-burdened caravels", the Benny Hinns and even the Donald Trumps.

We love foreign consultants who come here and pull together all the work already done by locals, repackage it, and collect their remunerations in US dollars without any questions. Local professional consultants are usually disregarded and their TT dollar billings always queried.

Locals were asked to turn around WASA but were never given the funds to facilitate this. Severn Trent of Britain came and were given government guarantees to raise the necessary funds to run WASA, and today they are declaring profits without having introduced anything different from what was already advanced by locals.

Once we remain locked into this way of seeing, there shall be no breakaway in how we do things. The Caribbean reality of monoculture, whether of sugar, bananas or oil, dependent on preferential treatment and favoured export arrangements, shall continue. In the meantime we shall await miracles and messiahs and foreign intervention, rather than walk our own road to salvation.

Professor Theodore Lewis, writing in another newspaper, called for the creation of a new set of economic possibilities, as Lloyd Best has done for two decades, that can generate new jobs given the present depressed commodity prices and the old arrangements to which we are tied. Lewis mentioned as likely choices computer technologies, graphics and animation.

That brought to mind the untiring efforts of one John Learie "Teddy" Bruce. He is the undeniable pioneer of animation training and cartoon productions in T and T, the designer and manufacturer of a pilot TV series based on cartoon characters called the Caribbean Bunch.

"Teddy" by himself is an industry. The Philippines and Toronto are the animation centres of the world, and Teddy's dream is to make TT another such centre.

His hope is to package Caribbean imagination for global distribution and, in the process, employ thousands of people.

He has established Caribbean Animation Ltd, trained youths at John Donaldson, and acquired through SGI Corp in Toronto and UNESCO funding, advanced Silicon Graphics computer equipment and the latest FLINT image integrator software that he has now housed at Video Associates under special arrangements. Yet he is still unable to procure the financing to launch this multi-million dollar industry.

Ironically, the place he sought to seat this industry is the very hangar being renovated for the $81 million one-night Donald Trump beauty show that benefits no one but Trump.

Meanwhile, Teddy twiddles his thumbs hoping that one day soon the Caribbean will come to trust and embrace native intelligence.

brenco@tstt.net.tt