Put on your armour for 2017

Here at home, Government and Opposition are locked in some sort of ideological warfare that is rooted in nothing that can help move us forward in a changing, difficult world. Many of us are tired of the endless, pointless litigation, the double speak and grand charging when we should be building consensus and avoiding conflict. It is not an overstatement that people are fearful.

Mostly, we are afraid for our lives and those of loved ones as the savagery and barbaric nature of the unpunished crimes committed speak to a deep malaise in our society, which is what really scares us. It does not arise from people being “bad” by nature but from a long-term failure of government policy that has managed hardly to correct the profound inequalities we inherited from the colonial period, rather they have become more entrenched. It is tedious to repeat the list of woes that have contributed to the sickness at the heart of TT society when there is little collective will to change the situation. Anyone brave enough to name names and identify the problem is vilified. Yet, it’s the first step to the change for the better that we pray for.

What should also make us shudder are the goings on in the world around us.

Internationally, the old hegemonies are collapsing and we face an increasingly ideologically polarised and divided world politics, as we simultaneously experience huge technological change that paradoxically connects us, economically and socially. People of my post-WWII generation believed that we had set a course in which international relations would be conducted through robust international institutions such as the UN, where nations would sit together and work out problems aimed at avoiding war and destruction. There, even if it was not always perfect, we would settle on good practise to create better, fairer societies.

Last week for the first time at the UN Security Council, the USA failed to support Israel’s illegal expansion of settlers’ compounds in occupied Palestinian territory, the only of 15 countries to abstain, thereby sending a unified message to Israel. Donald Trump retaliated by defiantly naming a new US ambassador of the extreme right and pro-settlements, promising that once it is a Trump White House everything “will be different”. How exactly, we are not sure, but he is determined to change life as we have known it, in every sphere.

Amid the uncertainty we can be sure that America’s new policy of protectionism and isolation will lead to the withering of the project of international order and multinational trade. If the Trump administration sticks to its electoral guns, we face harder economic times: with getting our goods into US markets; the planned return to coal production blows our regional alternative energy/climate change programme out of the water, with all the investment opportunities that promised; we will have to contribute more financially to regional security and feel the effect of tough immigration policies.

Trends in Europe are only marginally more encouraging, at least for the Caribbean, but we have little reason to believe we will get the better deal in either camp.

And politically, will we be in the Trump camp vis-a-vis Cuba, and if not, at what price? China’s economic sallies into this region may well create another flashpoint.

I hope Caricom leaders have started contemplating what 2017 looks like. We must try hard to focus on what opportunities might present themselves, for they always do. Now more than ever we need visionary Caribbean leadership to navigate the choppy, unchartered waters we are entering.

Good luck everybody.