Time to think again

Errol Miller

THE TIMES in which we live are fraught with contradictions and failed solutions. It is fashionable these days to speak of leaner government and a smaller state. Many see the hope of the future in non-governmental organisations and organisations of civil society. However, those countries that have literally dispensed with the state, and are totally in the hands of civil society, are in social and political chaos. They are run by warlords and militias and are unable to deliver basic services to their people. We only have to look at countries like Sierra Leone, Liberia, Somalia or Yugoslavia to find these kinds of contradictions.

The Cold War is over and the threat of nuclear destruction appears to have subsided. However, the decade of the 1990s saw an astonishing level of violence that prevailed on the streets and in homes. People are feeling less safe than ever before. The evidence does not support the standard explanation that poverty is at the root of the violence. For example, the Bahamas has a per capita income of over US$20,000 per person compared with about US$1,500 for Jamaica. However, the murder rate per capita for the year 2000 to date in both countries is about the same. The US economy is booming but hardly a week passes without somebody taking up a gun and going on a rampage. This is occurring in inner cities and in suburbia and knows no racial boundaries.

In this era when the market reigns supreme, competition should be thriving. However, with the mergers and acquisitions that are taking place in the corporate world big companies are swallowing up smaller companies and competition is declining not increasing. The larger and larger trans-national corporations that now run things are not about free markets or competition or risk taking, but about control and domination by the administrators that run them. Many of the CEOs of such corporations are more powerful than Prime Ministers and so do tell countries what they can or cannot do.

One of the buzzwords of our time is empowerment. But when the reality is examined closely more and more people are being marginalised than ever before. There is the impression of freedom of choice but a reality of predetermined menus of options from which to choose.

Turning closer to home, we should remember that in the early 1990s the general agreement by Government and business was that by deregulating the economy, privatising government-owned entities, allowing the market to determine the exchange rate and reducing the size of government the economy would take off. The private sector would become the engine of economy growth and government would be able to reduce its debt burden and also be able to provide the kind of education and health care that people need. Far from taking off the economy has stalled. Many entities that were privatised are back in public ownership. The government's debt burden is much larger than it ever was and the debt piled up by the financial sector losses is humongous.

Further, government is struggling to provide the same level of education and health services that it did in the past.

The point is that there are many aspects of our times that are not what they appear to be. Further, many of the premises and promises have proven to be false.

Sincerely wrong

One way of attempting to come to terms with these contradictions and shattered promises is to assume that the people making the decisions, and advocating the various positions, knew exactly what they were doing and deliberately and wickedly brought these situations to pass. But even if some of this is so, it cannot account for the magnitude of what obtains. Closer to the truth may be that those who have been charting the courses of actions were sincere, but have been sincerely wrong.

We may know far less about our present circumstances than we think.

It seems to me that we need to stop and think again. What worries me is that we seem to be uncritically accepting trends and current dogma while repeating the same failed solutions without the humility of admitting past failure. Far from facing up to the emptiness of the options tried, we are blaming the execution of those options. It is time to ask some hard questions and to answer them openly and honestly before we continue to go blindly with the trends and dogma of the times.

Errol Miller is Professor and head of the Institute of Education, UWI, Mona.

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