Reflections…
Please use pix, if possible, of Thompson/Jagdeo and Owen Arthur

SINCE THIS is the last edition of the Sunday Chronicle before the dawn of 2010, I am taking the opportunity to extend some personal good wishes for the New Year with a focus on national honours.

First, my wish that, in the words of Barbados’ Prime Minister, David Thompson, that our Caribbean Community countries will succeed in working their way out of the clutches of the global economic crisis and “be ready to rebound” with realistic fiscal adjustments in 2010.

“What I will say for Barbados,” Thompson had told a recent media briefing, “is that we were in a reasonably fortunate position (during 2009), because we were still able to go to the capital markets, which was a vote of confidence in our country, and were able to manage our external position quite comfortably…”

In Guyana, President Bharrat Jagdeo, Chairman of CARICOM, was noting last week the varying levels of economic bludgeoning suffered by countries of the Community (worse being Jamaica), with Trinidad and Tobago “probably being the exception,” due largely to significant financial resources earned from oil and natural gas.

Jagdeo said that Guyana itself had been “fortunate” to escape the travails of a number of CARICOM partner states. This he attributed to accumulated work, over a long period, in debt payments and prudent management of fiscal resources that contributed to the avoidance of “any major shrinkage in our revenue…”

In Trinidad and Tobago, Prime Minister Patrick Manning, having successfully hosted the Fifth Summit of the Americas, and later the Commonwealth Heads of Government Conference — for which he earned the warm plaudits of leaders from small and powerful states, is currently facing increasing challenges for 2010 in his leadership style of governance, as well as government’s policies and programmes.

Sir Owen Arthur?
But, so much about governments and their leaders for now. My excursion into offering personal good wishes for the New Year begins with the hope of a correction of what may have been an oversight by Prime Minister Thompson’s administration in 2009 in the distribution of knighthoods.

The Daily Nation may have said it well in its editorial of December 8 when, in commenting on the two latest Barbadians to be honoured as Knights of St. Andrew, noted that “any serious and impartial assessment of their contributions in public office would confirm how deserving Philip Greaves and Maurice King are of this nation’s highest honour…”

My own good wishes for 2010 is that when the time for conferring new knighthoods in Barbados come around, that the assumed oversight in 2009 would be corrected in favour of one of the nation’s most outstanding government leaders — Owen Seymour Arthur — the longest-serving Prime Minister after National Hero, Errol Walton Barrow.

Whatever lingering political bitterness or prejudices there may be from his opponents and detractors, the objective factors of the BLP’s 14 year in office under the leadership of Arthur would most certainly satisfy established criteria for elevating this well-known regional economist and politician to the status of a Knight of St. Andrew (Barbadian, as distinct from a British knighthood).

Those who know him would attest that there will be no canvassing whatsoever by the former Prime Minister for a knighthood or any relevant national honour.

It is, however, to be hoped that it would not take as long to confer on Arthur a knighthood — the honour bestowed, on his recommendation, for now Sir Lloyd Erskine Sandiford and Sir Richard Haynes — as it had taken to rename the Sherbourne Conference Centre after Sandiford.

T&T/Guyana awards scheme: I also wish that in 2010, there will be less political controversy and more transparency in the selection process of nationals of Trinidad and Tobago for the nation’s highest award — Order of the Republic, which has replaced the long controversial Trinity Cross, following a judicial ruling.

There persist concerns over the selection process in conferring national honours — which I would like to believe was never the intention of the creation of the national awards scheme.

In the case of Guyana, it has been a long time since the government was engaged in the once annual practise of awarding nationals and, in particular, conferring the nation’s highest honour — Order of Excellence.

Why? It cannot really be that all the deserving Guyanese nationals serving the nation at home lack what it takes to satisfy the criteria for awards.

My wish, therefore, is for the national awards committee and the decision makers to become energised in resuscitating this awards scheme, and not allow either pettiness or political arrogance to get in the way.

If it is, as elsewhere in the region, worthwhile to have a functioning national awards scheme in Guyana, then let 2010 be the year for its resumption, and with the transparency required for ALL national awards in EVERY state of our Community.

For now, I conclude with a final wish for 2010: That it will be the year when CARICOM shows a new spirit of unity in methodically advancing the goal of phased free intra-regional movement of nationals to live and work.

This would require determined efforts by officialdom to cut the double-speak, the apologies and misrepresentations and, most certainly, the bitterness that’s too often exposed in an integration movement whose ‘leaders’ like to talk about our being ‘One Community, One People’.

A sorrel toast towards peace and progress in 2010!