Despite their expenditure of tens of millions of dollars on radio and television facilities designed to inform and educate The Bahamian people on any number of important public issues, successive governments have have been obliged to witness at first hand a veritable tsunami of ignorance.
The consequences are clear enough when an ill-informed and poorly educated (public) makes decisions commensurate with the extent of its ignorance.
This way is not good enough.
A case in point today is the so-called debate concerning the Caribbean Single Market and Economy, (CSME). For want of a better and more efficient public information initiative, demagogues and any number of self-appointed ‘experts’ are having a field day.
From a definitional point of view, a ‘single market’ is a space within which goods and services, people, capital and technology freely circulate. When created among States, it involves, so far as market transactions are concerned, the complete removal of physical, technical and fiscal frontiers. Thus, for example, moving goods or services, capital or people from Trinidad and Tobago to Barbados would be no different from moving them across parish borders in Barbados itself.
A single market is thus somewhat different from a ‘common market’, which is an arrangement among States to remove market barriers, while the frontiers themselves remain. In the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas, unlike the Single European Act (1986), there is no concept of an area without frontiers. In fact, to the contrary, the Treaty implicitly rests on the maintenance of frontiers, within which it is the aim to liberalize conditions of access to markets. Thus, although the Treaty refers to a ‘single market’ this is in effect no different from the pre-existing common market.
Tthe Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas goes further to establish a ‘single economy.’ This requires unified economic and monetary policies, including related legislation, executive instruments and institutions. One of the most important instruments of a single economy is a single currency – just as there is a single Barbados currency for all parishes of the country.
What is also quite clear to us is that this is a project for the long term. In and of itself this is extremely important, providing as it does a space where adjustments can be made by all and sundry.
We are today quite convinced that Bahamians need information and answers that would help them allay their fears about change and the future. On CSME successive administrations have failed miserably. Surely Bahamians are not getting near enough in terms of good public information. Instead what it does get in far too many instances is propaganda concerning this or that high public official.
Take for example the current administration’s handling of the matter concerning the Caribbean Single Market and Economy. Despite appearances on radio talk shows by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Fred Mitchell and High Commissioner Leonard A. Archer, today’s public remains mired in a mud of confusion; a place where the fears, prejudices and hope of tens of thousands are confused and promiscuously commingled.
Nevertheless, the Government seems determined to press on, regardless.
Again – and as perhaps it must be in the circumstances- when called upon to debate and intelligently discuss an issue, there is instead a cacophony of voices on the question as to whether The Bahamas should or should not sign on to the Caribbean Single Market and Economy.
On the one side is the Government of The Bahamas, which is giving every indication that the issue is a ‘done deal’; that there will be no referendum or any other such thing; and that it will sooner, rather than later move to deepen The Bahamas’ involvement with its neighbors to the south.
On the other side of the street –so to speak- is any number of voices and views as to what should or should not be done. And as is to be expected in circumstances are people who surmise that they will be hurt by the move, and would want to maintain things just the way they are. And too there are people –perhaps a long-suffering silent majority- that just does not understand what is going on; and would love it if some one –say the Government- would tell them in plain English what the Caribbean Single Market and Economy, The Free Trade Area of The Americas, and The World Trade Organization are all about.
To put the matter at hand as simply as possible, Bahamians need information and answers that would help them allay their fears about change and the future. Bahamians are not getting near enough in terms of good public information. Instead what it does get in far too many instances is propaganda concerning this or that high public official.
Editorial from The Bahama Journal
