 activities, events, and I will ask that those with questions just use the little handrails sign on your Zoom and we will try to accommodate you as best as we can. I will proceed and I will ask Mr. Hyerson to open up with some remarks. Thank you Mr. Gibson. I'm pleased to welcome everyone to the first installment of Independence Dialogue Tuesdays organized by the Consulate General of St. Lucia in New York. Under the theme A Time for Reflection on National Gains and Challenges and They Wave Forward. Our goal is to engage foster consciousness and awareness of our fellow St. Lucia's both at home and abroad. As such, we have gathered an impressive lineup of speakers who will over the next few weeks, four weeks, address a range of timely and important issues. We at the Consulate would like to express our heartfelt thanks and appreciation to our featured speaker this evening, Dr. Tennyson Joseph. Dr. Joseph will address us on the topic St. Lucia's socioeconomic transformation post-independence. We believe that given Dr. Joseph's prominence and professional journey that his views on tonight's topic would be of tremendous interest to our audience. Thank you Dr. Joseph for lending us your expertise on the topic St. Lucia's socioeconomic transformation post-independence. I want to thank you all for taking time to join us this evening. Thank you, Dan. All right. Thank you, Mr. Hassan. Okay, I believe we have the Ambassador, H.E. Julian Dubois, St. Lucia's Ambassador to the Diaspora, who will present some remarks. Ambassador Dubois, you will tell him. Okay, thanks much, Mr. Gibson. And I wish to recognize Consul General Jerry Mayer Hyacinth, Consul General Henry Mungal, Consul General Daryl Montrup, our esteemed speaker this evening, Dr. Tennyson Joseph, a dear colleague. My brothers and sisters throughout the Diaspora, I bid you a pleasant good evening. And I want to sincerely welcome you to this forum, this very educational undertaking. On behalf of the minister who was supposed to be with us, he asked that I express his sincere apologies, having been in another engagement with the cabinet, that he could not leave at this time, but he certainly joined us later in the evening, if time permits. Okay, I really want to congratulate the Consulate General of New York with the support of Ambassador Mene Sarambali for undertaking this great initiative. You know, the Office of Diaspora Affairs always stands prepared to support these initiatives as it falls in line with what we're endeavoring to do and successfully pursue. We at the Diaspora Affairs Office also pursue or undertake the virtual diaspora engagements quarterly. And it's to expose our nationals to some of the the undertakings by our government, by our country, because our vision is that our nationals, regardless of where they reside, would be so informed, so connected, so kept abreast of what's happening at home, that they'd feel as involved in our decision making, in our development activities, if they so desire, as if they were at home, or as our nationals who are resident at home. And this event this evening is in pursuit of this very goal. Okay, I must say it is quite rewarding to know that we have the resources right among us, the likes of Dr. Tennyson Joseph, who every time we call upon is always available and ready to provide us support. So with this, indeed, I would like to thank everyone for joining us. I'm hoping that we continue to celebrate our 45th anniversary of Independence with great glory and great applause. And I would like to continue thanking our Consulate General in New York for this undertaking. So here's to a great event. And thanks once again, my brothers and sisters. Good evening. Thank you Ambassador Debois. I am now going to introduce Darryl Monttrop, the newly-installed Consulate General of Saint Lucia in Miami, to introduce the guest speaker. Mr. Monttrop. Thank you, Deane. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Wherever you may be rooming or settled, I have been assigned the simplest but most thoughtful task of introducing my friend and comrade to present this evening's lecture. This lecture is taking place as part of our own necessary reflection on the Independence experience. As we seek to celebrate and map the forty-fourth anniversary of Saint Lucia's Independence under the theme Duval Assam, one people shaping our destiny, it is imperative that we cast a critical eye on what that journey has meant. Duval Assam of our together suggests a shared hope of progress. Whilst our opinion and views are heterogeneous or varied, we are fairly homogenous as a people. This homogeneity allows us to unite under one flag as one people, yet there remains the tension over the direction of our country. How can we shape the destiny of shared prosperity, particularly given our history, where the value of our productive endeavours was not utilized for our common good? One person who can certainly address this step accidentally is tonight's presenter, Dr. Tennyson Josef. Tennyson, muscles from this community, when you look at these affectants in no time, is a lecturer at the university. I say lecturer, not the many she started in the university, but to accentuate his role in shaping regional minds as a teacher in the purest sense of the word. Any college and university professor can communicate their ideas when they publish articles and papers at conferences. Many, unless pursued interdisciplinary, really share ideas with colleagues in other fields. They engage with the general public of course in the case, even less frequently. And when they do, they sometimes still translate the research into language that is put by the audiences that lack familiarity with the discipline. As such, academics have been just criticized for the inability to make their research on critical topics understandable to lay audience. The lack of interaction between academics and the public was as important research to be obscured in translation. It encourages public skepticism and intensifies the negative perceptions of higher education. Dr. Josef, as the constant public intellectual, does not suffer those ailments. His scholarship is not merely theoretical, but grounded in his life, serious. There's a cultural critic by the name of Arthur Mercer who states that the defining part of the public intellectual is attention between theory and practice, contemplation, and action. He says that the public intellectual is a knower of ideas and partakes in the public sphere. Public intellectuals are known to disturb the peace as they often challenge the state of school and the ways of seeing and doing. Tonight, expect Dr. Josef to disturb you as he addresses and mutual socio-economic transformation post-independence. With expectations raised by advocates of independence through independence period, the challenge of meeting public demands between inter-political crises for new entities and then evolve and escape working of political opponents. Of course, things stand to be spiraled downward from there. Was or is this our story? We need a clear-eyed assessment of the past four years and Dr. Josef is for you to help know that. For those who don't know it, Tennyson Josef is born and in the 20th century education at Tender College. He attained his PhD from the University of Tender and his MFIL and PA from UWI Cable. His MFIL was written on the political profile and his PhD in politics and on the politics of political colonization and globalization. He has been a lecturer in political science at the University of Tender College from since 1967. Of course, prior to that, Tennyson Josef has had a significant impact to primary education. He had between 2000 and 2003 and served in the Senate during 2000, at least between 2006 and 2007. Of course, in addition to teaching, Tennyson is constantly engaged as a public intellectual. He is a weekly columnist in the Daily Nation newspaper and he has served in various capacities in the original task force. His research areas include Caribbean political philosophy, to allow James Stott's political thought, to political thought of politics, of course, his study of Caribbean politics and St. Louis's politics and post-1945. Tennyson would be surprised when he said that he committed to the idea of an engaged intellectual, particularly in the resourceful regions like Caribbean, in which significant among public resources are public education, to correct the historical legacies of the and the funding. As a disciple of the idea of an engaged organic intellectual, Dr. Joseph has unhesitatingly offered his views on public affairs various media outlets throughout the Caribbean. Ladies and gentlemen, sons and daughters of St. Louis, I present to you my friend and comrade, a true patriot, Dr. Tennyson Joseph. Okay, thank you, colleagues. Thank you, comrade. Monthru, for those very inspiring words, though a bit dimmed and rooted, but I could hear the sincerity in your voice and I appreciate the sentiments expressed. Let me first of all give my congratulations and show my deep respect to the St. Louis Council in New York, in particular, the Councilor-General, Jerry Meyer, for organizing this very important activity. I think one of the things that we have always suffered from historically is the way in which we have not yet devised proper mechanisms for including our diaspora and our overseas resources into the national development effort. I think what we are witnessing tonight and what I can sense has been happening in recent times is a concerted attempt to bring our diaspora more into the mainstream development of our societies, particularly since we are not enough resource population-wise and also because the diaspora constitutes some of the most, obviously, globally exposed people. We have among the most educated sections of our population and our most skilled personnel, more of them living outside than inside. So we cannot afford the luxury of not including our diaspora in our central and our national development efforts. As the years go by, this will become more and more a central part of what we do as small island-developing nations. Let me thank, of course, all the other Councilor-Generals who are here with us tonight, particularly my friend Darryl Montreux and my comrade Julian Du Bois, my respected friend, Minister Rambali, and the other colleagues who, Mr Henry Mandel, who I think is with us, and all the other friends and colleagues. Let me also say good night to the class of 85s. I'm sorry for doing so, but I have to do it. The St. Mary's College class of 85, who I think, through our WhatsApp chat, we have been making a special effort to keep our ties together. And these are very important ties. And I know many of the colleagues and brothers are actually part of the diaspora too, living in Canada, North America, and I want to say a special good night to them. On our WhatsApp chat, I promised them that we wanted to do some rural together tonight. I don't think it is possible for me to do it by myself. I think I want to invite the colleagues to share in what I'm trying to do so we can, as Darryl says, we can disturb in the woods of Bob Marri, disturb our neighbors a bit from what we have to see tonight. I want to say, first of all, colleagues, that I do not want this to be a lecture. I honestly don't want this to be a formal lecture. I want it to be a dialogue in the spirit of the Dialogue Tuesday nomination that you have given to this activity, but also because I think the kind of activity I want to have and the kind of forum we're having now is not one in which I want to sit and give a kind of stiff and formal lecture, but I want to have a conversation about the topic before us. So I have decided not to present, I hope the chair can forgive me for that, not to present a formal lecture. I have prepared a few speaking notes and those notes are only to keep me on track to my scenes. I want to make this a conversation, not a lecture. And I also do not want it to be a monologue. So Mr. Chair, what I plan to do, what is your indulgence, is to speak for about 30 minutes basically to present what I call the central thesis of my talk tonight. And I think by the time my 30 minutes of speaking is over, I would have said basically the key things that I would have wanted to say. So after 30 minutes, I may continue talking if there are two, one or two things I think that are left unsaid. But I think after 30 minutes, the interventions from our group, our chat group right now can start coming and we can have a dialogue and hopefully I will basically indicate when I think I have finished my formal presentation. And then we can have the formal back and forth discussion. I want to apologize with the chair that violates the principle or the procedure that you had assumed that you would pursue. But I also want to indicate that I really do want this to be a dialogue and not a formal lecture. And so I would be very appreciative if we approach it in this manner that I have put forward there tonight. So basically, I want to do about three things in my talk tonight. So I have been tasked to speak on solutions, socioeconomic transformations, independence. So I want to develop my thesis, which is to make a connection between socioeconomic transformation and in particular social transformation. And I know why and I will indicate why I'm stressing social transformation and independence. So there is a link I am going to assert between social transformation and this instrumentality of sovereign power, which we call independence, which allows for social transformation. So in doing so, I will be seeking to show that the essence of independence relies primarily on space that it allows a sovereign state. It allows you a space for sovereign statehood, which essentially gives you the capacity to engage in social transformation. And built into that thesis is also the view that the colonial state was not designed for social transformation. So I will be contrasting, comparing and contrasting the colonial state against the post-colonial state. And I've been making the point that it is this thing which we call social transformation, which should be in theory, the main dividing line between the colonial state and a post-colonial state. The colonial state, I will argue, is concerned with other things. Of course, the colonial state is concerned with arguments, two basic things. It is concerned with basically a kind of, let's call it a coercive apparatus, in other words, military and other forms of social control, to keep domestic populations in check because it is actually a colonial relationship and extractive apparatus to siphon wells from the colony to the metropole. Once a colonial state achieves those two basic things, then the colonial state has achieved its objective. So by extension, a post-colonial state and independent state has to be something more than just the question of social control and extracting resources from the colony to the metropole. And that is where I think the discussion I want to take it should go. So I'm saying essentially that when we look at solutions independent, so once I have established the differences between colonial state and the post-colonial state, what I want to do is to explore briefly the post-colonial, the anti-colonial and post-colonial history of solution, showing how the main differences between the two main contending political parties over time, the differences have revolved largely around the question of the extent to which the post-colonial state can or should engage in post-colonial social transformation. I want to make a point very early, all of the post-colonial governments of San Lucia have been interested in post-colonial social transformation. But the main differences between those governments exist or lie on the question of how far one can go. So there is always an economic overarching question, which shapes or limits or underpins this question of social transformation. And that is what I think the main dividing line between all of our political administrations have been and you can split them however you want and you can you can examine them by personality and leaders or you can examine them over time but I've just given you what in my view and I hope we can have differences of opinion on that would have been the main contours that separate one political party from another, one particular leader from another. So to put it to you in stark terms, there are those that focus largely on the economic questions. So there are those that focus largely on keeping what the language we hear is getting the economic fundamentals right, ensuring that you have income and revenue and so forth that the state does not overextend itself. That is one view and that view is always linked to a broader global environment, which we will also take into consideration in our conversation tonight. And that is contrasted against those who start, and I must admit from where I sit, from the perspective that post-colonial transformation has to do with social transformation. And therefore, what distinguishes a post-colonial state from a colonial state is the extent to which that post-colonial state starts on the perspective that local populations, their lives, the quality of life have to be transformed from what existed under colonialism. So very often those who hold the economic fundamentals question, when you open and expose the policy frame of when you blame them there, there basically is no fundamental difference to what a colonial state would have done and to what that other orientation allows you to do. So just to give you another clear example of what I'm trying to say, questions like the development of a local entrepreneurial class, and by local I mean a national bourgeoisie. That can be an important question that a post-colonial state takes into consideration, that a colonial state is not interested in developing a local bourgeoisie or a local entrepreneurial class. A colonial state is only ensuring, as I said to you before, siphoning resources from a colonial state to the metropole. And therefore, a post-colonial state might say, well, you know something, let us reserve some areas for local economic activities and so forth. And those questions are always there. But very often what you find, those entities or those groups or those individuals or those classes who focus on the economic side often do so on the basis that yes, we are going to come to the social side, but we have to get the economics right. And that I think is one of the fundamental contradictions I want us to work through tonight. That contradiction between economic stability and growth and social transformation. I think the two things I'd like to ask in my conclusion tonight, I want to make some policy prescriptions to suggest how we can, in fact, overcome this contradiction and make the two join the two. And I will make some suggestions as to how in the 21st century, in the present moment, we can do that. So I hope we are still here before I'm going through. So basically, the second task I will do is to spend some time looking at the post-colonial history of Saint Lucia, showing how the main differences between the two is very often there were two main contending parties revolved around the question of the extent to which post-colonial transformation should take place. And the balance is to be placed on economic fundamentals, however defined. And also linked to that, how much deliberate spending one can do on social measures to transform the lives of the majority population. That doesn't mean that there were not other considerations in this question of independence. Another important consideration in this question of independence was the question of the foreign policy. Because if you think of the colonial state, one of the key differences between the colonial state and the post-colonial state is that under the colonial state, you did not have the instrumentality of sovereignty in your hand. So your ability to make, to have foreign relations and to engage in relations with other states was out of your hand. And but once you achieved independence, that was also within your hand. And you can also see in there debates about to what extent you do foreign policy that restricts what just perceived to be a government, or you do foreign policy on the other hand that enlarges your partners and enlarges your relations beyond those that existed under colonialism. So you can see what I'm saying that it's a complex set of questions. A very complex set of questions that involves many things, the transformation, cultural transformation, the development of a local bourgeoisie, the widening of your foreign policy, the shifting of the economic relations, all of those are complex questions that go into this thing we call independence. But for tonight's purpose, we're trying to focus and narrow it down to the question of social transformation or socio-economic transformation. And hopefully as the dialogues continue over the next few weeks, we can have more perspectives focusing on other themes. So that would be my second task. So the third thing I want to do, we'll be to turn directly to the question of the social transformation of Saint Lucia over the period. And since the Consulate General has given us the task of examining the question from Saint Lucia's independence, I will focus on the question from 1979, which is when Saint Lucia gained its independence. So I will be trying to explain, that will be the meat of the presentation in my view, where I'm trying to give you a brief history of solution social transformation over various historic periods. So that's the title of my third section, a brief history of solutions social transformation. And I'll be looking at basically about four periods, the period of what I call banana economy and starting from 1979. I know the banana economy began before 1979. But because our terms of reference is to deal with the question of independence, I will be speaking of it from banana economy from 1979 to 1990. And 1990 is what I call the rise of globalization. So we have an end point there. The second period through which I will examine solution social economic transformation will be the period 1990, 2008. And of course, 2008 is the beginning of what was then referred to as the second Great Depression. So notice, I'm jumping from crisis to crisis. And it is within those jumps from crisis to crisis, that we have something called a solution independence project that is trying to transform social lives. And because you have a broad overarching framework of global economic crisis, you can see why the debate between those who hold the issue of economics or the mentalism will matter because you have a global crisis. And those who hold those who hold an alternative view, which is to spend money on social transmission would then be engaging debate within the context of a broad of broad global economic crisis. So that's my second period. And the third period, I would call the period 2008 to the present. And the period 2008 to the present, we can think of it as a long, a long crisis of global capitalism. So if I were to just throw out some markers there, indeed, we can even go back to the 9-1-1, 2008, then you had a more recently COVID crisis, then it was a massive blow to anybody's economic globally. And then you had the more recently, as we speak, the world to create. So this whole period 2008 to the present, we will call the long crisis of global capitalism. And in that period too, I'll be making some very broad go-downs about socioeconomic transmission and solution in keeping with my theme about what a post-colonial state can and cannot do. And finally, I want to close on a prescriptive note, because we are often accused of talking and describing. A lot of us do that very well. We can describe and we can analyze. But we are very weak when it comes to prescribing. So with your indulgence, Chair Gibson, I want to conclude by offering some prescriptions. But I am speaking largely of the so-called contradiction between economic transmission and economic stability and economic growth and economic fundamentals on one hand, and what I call social transmission on the other. So in my last part, which is my conclusion, I'll prescribe policy measures, which in my view bridge the gap between the two. So there is very no... In other words, we are going to try to resolve the contradiction. And there really is no contradiction except if you just shift your lens a little. You can see that there is very no contradiction between social transformation, transforming the lives of the main human resources to the people, and economic growth and economic stability, and bringing in foreign exchange, and all of the other things that the so-called those who hold to economic fundamentals normally rely on. So I'll be making with your indulgence policy prescriptions. And after I do that, I can conclude, and hopefully we can have a little dialogue. The hotter it gets, the better and happier I will feel. The more you disagree with me, the happier indeed I will feel. So I come to my first part, which is to say something very quickly because I only gave myself 30 minutes to talk about colonialism, independence, and the question of social development. Now before I go any further and say anything about colonialism, independence, and the question of social development, I want to just say something. I hope there are young people listening, because I'm making this point for a very important reason. I didn't invite my students to come into this chat. I'm not sure if they did, but there are many young people in solution outside who basically have a false view of what colonialism is. So I'm not sure if any of you follow these polls. Every year, I think, and I'm not speaking with hard and cold facts. I'm giving you what I have, what I have picked up for my own reading, and I've still it myself. There was a time when I used to follow every year the Jamaican independence, American independence, the glimmer of the pool, and one of the questions obviously was, they would ask the public if the, whether the same Jamaican condition is better with independence or not. And very often, every year, the polls will say we should have stayed, we should have stayed under this organism. And very often this is the young people who are saying so. So when I, this part of my talk where I'm talking about what colonialism is, the essence of colonialism versus the essence of an independent state, I want to direct that conversation to young people so that they would understand that a lot of the myths about post-colonial state, the pre-colonial period and how things were better would be false. So that is really what I want to do. So what is the essence then between the colonial state and the post-colonial state? I was saying in my little introductory remarks, you can actually reduce the post-colonial state to two things. That is what a post-colonial state does. A post-colonial state, you can actually reduce a colonial state to two things. What does a colonial state do? In essence, a colonial state has two basic functions to suppress local population. That is why very often you see a strong military apparatus, very firm on police, on prisons. And of course, if you go back further, you will see that's where you have, you have forts and you have guns pointing at the, at the cities. So castries and, and, and, and VG and pigeon point, of course there were wars, there were inter-colonial wars which made those things necessary. But there was also suppressing the domestic population. So, so there were, the state is not meant for the development of people. The state is meant to suppress the majority population and that suppression of the majority population occurs because the state has an, the colonial state has an extractive function. So if, if you take something like public services, let's take what you call roads, bridges, infrastructure, the infrastructure of a colonial state is not meant for people. So that when you build a road or bridge, like the African states, for example, the railway lines run from the, the, the plantation produced in the palm oil to the port. So that the railway lines are there. So the colonial state invests in railway lines, but the railway lines were not meant to transport human beings. The railway lines were meant for goods. Okay. So the colonial state is not interested in human development and the colonial state doesn't build schools, it doesn't build, it doesn't, doesn't give you libraries, it doesn't give you hospitals, it doesn't give you all of the things that you now normally demand from a colonial, opposed colonial state to make the lives of people better. So I have, in essence, summarized for you in very rough terms, what the, I don't know if it's the difference from Bob Marley, you know, Paris in Ball Head. He said it very nicely, you know, we built, you built your penitentiary, you know, you built penitentiary and when you built schools, it was not really for proper education and so forth. So College College in Barbados was a school built for white planters, sons, and the reason why that happens at College College, was because there was a local white resident population. But by and large, those is only after Emancipation 1846 in Trinidad and so forth, you begin to have basic amenities like schools. And by the way, they were not provided by the by the colonial state, they were provided by the church. So an NGO called the church, the Anglican Church of the Catholic Church, is providing schools in many cases of missionaries and so forth. The message is missionaries. So I make my point that the colonial state is not interested in in social development. Now, if the colonial state is not interested in social development, if the essence of the colonial state is that it is not interested in social development, then the postcolonial state, one of its missions, I would say logical mission is to do the things that the postcolonial state would not do. So the postcolonial state is no longer assured in theory, no longer be concerned only with suppression of local population and extracting resources. There are other questions that now become the business of the postcolonial state to take care of. The massive illiteracy, the very bad environments, environmental conditions, the public health diseases, the solution growing up, remember the last year and those things, the slum clearance. So these are these are the things, in other words, you are now creating a state that looks after human beings and not just concerned with economic economic questions. So so that is when when when the first president of Ghana, Khamenei and Krumah, was decolonizing, he made a famous comment seeking if was the political and everything else that I did on to the assumption was that once you had one instrumentality of independence, the political kingdom, then you could do all the other things would be added on to like magic. So I have the state, now I can have education, health care and so forth. Of course, the reality was a bit different because having inherited the postcolonial state, many governments realized that no, no, no, we still have the broad we now have a we in addition to having social responsibility for the massive population, where the money go to come from is a rough question. And that is why economic questions continue to to be a key feature. So in many, many cases, you had postcolonial situation in which the the same economic relations are quite blunt, let's take solution and bananas. So what what brought in for an exchange was bananas, you are the evolution gives so there was nothing on the agenda that spoke about the radical transformation of the economy because of that question called economic fundamentalism. And in the case of our, let me bring it down directly to solution. So our first prime minister who went into independence, who bought us into independence was Sir John. And Sir John was very aware of the question I'm talking about in addition to economic limitations. And for that reason, he overtly couched a policy called what I would call limited suffrage. If you read his independence speech, I invite every young solution or old solution to really independent speech. I do that for my little relaxation sometimes. I read the old independent speeches. So Compton is basically saying, in fact, he was repeating what Buster Manter had said, we are in the West, solution cannot fly in the face of history, Malcolm is flying the face of geography, and therefore our economic relations will continue to be the same. So essentially what you have is what I call in my book, nuanced or limited sovereignty. And that limited sovereignty was basically saying all of those big fancy things that you all think a post-colonial state can do, transform the lives of people that we don't have, I don't want to do them, but the economic questions will weigh for everything. So it was a limited independence. So the first thing we're noting in relation to this question of social transformation is that in the earliest years of independence, it was compromised on the basis of this narrow, this narrow articulation of what I call the sovereign possibilities of the post-colonial state. And the question of size, you know, the question of size was an important question, shaping independence. So again in Sir John's case, he made, he was talking about things like, basically when Sir John made his arguments for independence, he made his argument for independence in one of his convention speeches to his party. And he said that that I think encapsulates what I mean by limited sovereignty. Do you know when Sir John was making his arguments for independence, what Sir John said? Sir John said, the next area of growth for Sir Lucia is tourism. But I cannot go into tourism because I do not have the instrumentality of foreign affairs in my hand. I do not have, I do not have the instrumentality of foreign affairs in my hand. Because with foreign affairs, I can now engage in aviation negotiations with all kinds of airlines and all around the world. So that is why I'm going into independence. So all of the currency talks that you would have quite black power and breaking the colonial relationship and all of the other cultural and very important side of the colonization, that was not factored in the solution case because he was making an economic argument. I don't have a valid economic argument. I don't, he used to complain. I can't even go to a carry committee. Barbados and Jamaica, Guyana, and Chirin and Tobago have a carry committee. And I have to go as an observer. He used a nice phrase about, you don't want to be left behind, like floating on the beach. I'm left behind by the rising side of the empire. Some very different speech, but you get the point. So when he called his independence project, his independence project is couched in narrow economic terms. So all the broader questions, and I have a little more in my notes, I'm not going to go into them, all the broader questions, like the social transformation of society, education and so forth. These were not, I'm not saying that these were not important to him. Look at me wrong. I'm not saying what I'm saying is the capacity to do it. He claims we're not there. And of course, of course, that encapsulates for me what I want. So I've just basically said what I want to say about the difference between colonialism and post-colonialism. And I went into some detail about how solution couched its post-colonial environment. And now I want to come to the second part, which is to explain what I think frame the debates in the various political parties. And I think I said enough to hint to you what those debates were. So the so-called more radical groups began to make a case for a wider interpretation of the possibilities of solution. Okay. So if you remember the early debates, the early 70s, the early 80s, the debates about the health oil. So health oil has a terminal in Kaldesar. And the radical groups are now saying no, but there was not enough demand from health oil in terms of the charge post-report and the return to solution. Come to me again, if it's limited economic approach, this comes about employment and having a health oil provide jobs. And the more radicals are demanding more. One of the interesting things I want to show you, in fact, it's actually very stark. Think of something like schools. You know, maybe I can be corrected in tonight's meeting. But one of the things I actually discovered in looking at those yet secondary schools in solution, do you know that there was hardly the use of consolidated funds by the government solution, under the John to build secondary schools in solution? So you had, again, Roman Catholic Church, St. Mary's College, and then Joseph's Convent. Seven-day Adventist Church, the Seven-day Academy. George Charles and the SMP built the view for secondary school. In fact, George Charles said that he wanted to build a secondary school for the children in the South. Leon has comprehensive, after the hurricane, built by, again, the same Leon has I just mentioned. Because it's completely secondary school built by the present, the present, the father of the present Prime Minister of Canada. That's why it had the little symbol of built by the Canadians, and so on and so forth. Very much later, you will begin to see, again, I'm going to talk to that. So in other words, something like post-colonialism and education, fundamental things. These were not placed at the center. Whenever I was doing my PhD research, I had the pleasure of interviewing Osmox, the fundamental planner at the time. And Osmox told me, well, you know, Tennessee was very much aware of those social things, but he was waiting to do it a little later. And that struck me, because even more recently, I'll talk to that, we heard talks of, I'm going to do the, I want to get the economic fundamentals right first, before we can do some of the things that we plan to do. And that was, that is what I mean when I say the key differences between the two, the political parties. So there was, in fact, an ideological difference. I want to show you how the SLP under George Odlam and Josie had a different conception of what independence, I'm quoting from the Hansard, because I have that, that is the independence debate. You see that book, that little independence debate there, that is very, very important to me. That is where you get the philosophy of the two parties during the independence debate. And this is Josie speaking. You see, Mr. Speaker, solutions are always going to be second class citizens in solution. The reason for this, Mr. Speaker, is because at one time in solution, we had a ruling class that was represented directly in solution by the kids and kids of those colonial masters who colonized them. Everywhere you went in key positions in the service, you had a white man. On the plantations, you had a white boss. He was representing his white master overseas and was keeping us in subjugation, keeping us quiet for him. All that has happened when this government took power, he referred to Sir John's government, that before independence, is that you substitute the local master for the expatriate. You know, Mr. Speaker, what they call a concubine, you know, Josie was a very troublesome person. You know, Mr. Speaker, what they call a concubine? This government is a local concubine of the white expatriate exploiter. I like the radical phrase of this, the local concubine of the white colonial exploiter. That is what it is. This is what they are doing, performing the same role of exploiting our people as the foreigner. So I can't give it to you any more stuff than that. A difference in ideological opinion as to what a post-colonial state can do and what a post-colonial state should do and cannot do. And I have a little quote from him. He goes directly, can we in San Jose today say that if this government ever gets constitutional or political independence, that we will at the same time evolve automatically into economic independence and cultural liberation? Can we say that? So he puts cultural liberation on the agenda and he puts economic independence on the agenda. I can go further, but I will stop there in terms of explaining to you, just stepping up for you the differences into the ideological outlook on the possibilities of what a post-colonial state can and cannot do. Okay? So I now want to turn to the meat of our question, which is going to the political history of San Lucia and showing us, you can add this thing called social transmission. Remember my main thesis is that the essence of a post-colonial state is its extent to which it engages in social transmission. And why am I saying that is the essence? Because it is the opposite of what the post-colonial state did. I'm not inventing that. I'm telling you, if a post-colonial state could not do that or did not do that and intellectually could not do that, then a post-colonial state had to have been doing that. And I also want to make the point, I know I'm simplifying, but there are many more complex things about a colonial state and a post-colonial state, but I'm trying to give it the essence for the purpose of the talk we are tonight. So if we take the first period, 1979 to 1990, what I call the banana period. Now you know the banana economy is the focus of the thing. And let me show you how the two parties had the issue on bananas, again, into what we just read from Jews. So Sir John's argument, in fact, somebody I remember talking to, to Rasup, informally. And Rasup said Sir John used to say, all you talk of black power, look at the bananas. That is my black power. And it was also taking the other point because you would say, well, look, you have a farm, you have a group of farmers who are their own bosses. They have their land and they have already market. That is it. That's a progressive thing. In addition, we often forget that the SDGA was a rather very progressive, what today we would call a cooperative, a progressive cooperative. I suppose it had its own class divisions and so forth. But by and large, you can understand how the politics of solution is defined around that, but it was not really economic because it was based on the same gist and English conglomerate owning the rights to all of the produce. You had no alternative markets and you had something called you were basically price takers. And what I've just described there is the language that the radicals use to criticize gist. So you can see again the split, but that is, but more than that, I want to propose that the banana economy really changed it against social transformation. So one of my arguments, I know I said the one solution, it didn't go down too well. I made the point that look at what happened to the banana revenue. So did the farmers, the people who have grown the bananas, and you know the religions, Miku, Denry, Babuno, was there any radical transformation in the lives of the farmers? In fact, the Yankee report shows you a very disparate story of environmental damage, health damage, but most of all, where was the bank? Where was the farmers credit union? They had, they had, they were the ones bringing all the revenue into the country until there were no schools, there was no investment in social transformation and so forth. So the banana economy, 1979 to 1990, was again, when we had read many of Corpton's budget speeches, the same thing. Of course, I want to make a simple point. 1979 was the year of independence and 1979 was a year of global radicalism. So it in a sense, the SLP, Audlam and Josie and that group began to, at the very moment of independence, and you can understand that logically, began to play some very radical things on the agenda. Perhaps they went too far, but also, let's not forget, that the global environment was one. So you had, I can list them for you, the Iranian revolution, the national liberation movement taking place in Africa, the, the, we did a revolution. The Cuban revolution was consolidating itself. There was, in fact, an alternative. There was a non-aligned movement. Again, I can go into all of that, but, but what happened? That also made Sir John even less inclined because of course, again, he made that same independence which I told you about. He made this comment about, about, I will not do wasting my time on the barren wasteland of ideology. What he was able to say is, I'm focusing on economic questions, and this talk about the national liberation and so forth. There has no place. So essentially, 1970, 1990, 90, you had this, this very limited, and again, I'm hoping to be challenged to it. And when I say limited, I mean, where were the radical investment in healthcare? Where was the radical investment in sports? Where was the radical investment in schools and education? And there was, there was this straight jacket in terms of what the possibilities of solutions independence could mean. Because again, of that dichotomy between socioeconomic growth and stability, and, and social transformation. And of course, I know it's a wide period, but globalization, essentially, the banana economy collapsed on what we call globalization. That, that is the point I made in my book on solution. So let's think about it. Europe 1990, the loss of trade liberalization, the special preferences for markets for the special preferences for our bananas reaching European markets, the formation of the European Union, all those things, the rise of the WTO. So between 1996 1990, you had what was then known as the rise of globalization. And once globalization took place, the special arrangements which solution had with bananas collapsed. So the solution banana economy collapsed on the basis of an economic global phenomenon called globalization. And the way the economic collapse came political transformation. So John was retiring. Then you had this long problem with the, with the Banana Salvation Committee at the very, the very baby that had given rise to the content phenomena was what led to the collapse. And of course, 1990, 1997, the S&P Committee collapsed. So the S&P Committee collapsed now on a, let's call it, let's call it a reformed S&P. But on, with one key difference, the global banana, it's not one of the mandates of, I guess unspoken, one of the tasks performed by the Antony administration for the transitioning of solution out of bananas. You all remember the issue? Well, he was dealing with the issue of the privatization of the bananas and so forth until basically that whole banana political economy came to an end. But we have the question of social transmission. And that is what I think makes my point about concerning ideologies on what social transmission can mean. So let us go universal second. So all of these things which John has been hesitant about in relation to social transmission, no banana economy, but there was an articulation of a policy of developing solutions and solutions, bringing them into the modern world. I'm not sure, perhaps, maybe later history might tell us about that. I'm not sure if Antony's exposure to Barbados had given him a model, but I'd like to contrast the solution to Barbados. 1966, 1964, Compton is premiered, 19, or chief minister rather, 1966, Evel Barrow is prime minister, he has independence. So 64, 66, there's no big difference in that. And among the first things that Barbados does is a rapid policy of social transmission. When I ask people, tell me the difference between Barbados and solution. There is no difference in size and resources compared to Barbados and solution. The only difference is they have the investments in social, in the social sphere to Barrow immediately free university education at the newly formed university of the West Indies, free health care, subsidized transportation for elderly people, pension funds. All of what we now today call social democracy is what is implemented. So I would suggest I'm not sure if I have any firm argument to make it. He never told me so, but I think there was, in fact, he came into office with this social agenda. And just to go through, universal secondary education, the construction of secondary schools that were the one in Marigold, John Audler, and others, the broaching of universal health care. And I say broaching because he never got the chance to be fully completed, but it was on the agenda. The modernization of health facilities, the investment in the new mental hospital, the new, the new O'wen King Hospital, the construction of the procedure cricket ground, the construction of the George Audler National Stadium, the full integration of solution into what I call the West Indies cricket culture and fraternity, okay? Universal access, a policy of universal access in terms of basic things, water, light. So when I was attached at the time, the policy of universal access was basically, you give, you give light and power a million dollars a year, not light and power, sorry, with Barbados. You give Lusa like a million dollars a year or whatever the amount was, and put poles near people's houses. And the same thing with lime and so forth. You had to have a policy of universal access. No longer was it that people in Shorzan and the rural communities do have. If Cassius has it, make it universal. Of course, I'm starting to get the big thing, which is an economic one, which is the liberalization of telecommunications. So under Compton again, the limited saying lime, but it was cable and wires at the time, but no attempt to, and of course, that does not ignore the global environment. So you have this equal trade liberalization, the same trade liberalization, dobb, that bit the banana industry, for the same trade liberalization that we were using to now transform telecommunications. And let's also not forget that you have what I would call structural shifts, because no longer is the world built on agriculture and raw materials. You now had telecommunications and the world of the internet, and therefore the so-called knowledge economy. So those were the factors that immediately you have social transformation, because you now have an articulation of some of the things that the post-colonial states could and could not do. And they were doing it in a sense of a demonstrated capacity of doing it. But you also had the vulnerability to the external shocks. So that my second period, as I told you, is 1992, 2008. During that period, you had the American bombing of New York, the 9-1-1 thing, of course. Let's give a stark example, Kenny Anthony's investment in the Super Roschamel thing. It was the 9-1-1 that exposed the Roschamel, because when the hotel I was built was supposed to have paid back, then 9-1-1 meant you had. So in other words, there were external economic factors limiting, or at least that brought that project to an end. When putting it in very broad terms. So in terms of the economic side, that period meant you had a shift out of bananas into tourism and services. That was a broad economic shift. That is when you now begin money from financial services, and you now began to place greater emphasis on tourism. That was the new shift. But of course, that also made you vulnerable to external shock. But you get my sense when I said that there was, in fact, something called social transmission. You can let my nose to see if I forgot anything, but we all live through this period, so you would know for yourself. But of course, it comes to the final period. So the final period now, 2008, to the present, 2023. This is a period of global economic crisis, and in fact, massive global economics uncertainty. And I want to propose to you that that global economic uncertainty is reflected in the political uncertainty in St. Lucia, the one-term phenomenon. It is the fact that, you must take into consideration the death of some old long-standing generals who have thrown the politics asunder. But the truth remains, that period is such an uncertain period in terms of what the global environment allows that it has also reflected itself in political uncertainty, but also bearing in mind you have very two firm political parties. But what of economic transformation? So 2008 is the period of, I'm giving the very rough thing, the Kennedy Anthony administration to 2020, to 2020, the Compton King administration, again, a re-articulation of the same limited possibilities against, not limited possibilities of social transformation, focusing on very the same economic things. But the Kennedy period, the last Kennedy period, it was a clear articulate that the phrase I gave you just now about getting the economic fundamentals right, that was the phrase. So anybody can tell me, what tell me, I just said for you a whole set of things that were done in the 97 to 2006 period. What were the things done in the 2011 to 2016 period? There were very few. And again, because the language used was because they were overwhelmed by the economic reality. And of course, it was reflected, as I said, in the political situation. And of course, the rise of Alec. So I am now representing pure neoliberalism, liberalism in its essence. So any of these things with even Compton was because of his social democratic tradition, was able to focus on some basic little human development things. The Shastney administration is neoliberalism writ large. So concessions to hotels, concessions to foreign, of course, the DSH thing. And of course, any remnants of social transmission, any remnants of an emphasis on the social were there as hangovers on the previous period from 1997. So the uncompleted projects like the St. Jude and so forth, the Owen King Hospital. Both St. Jude was there already. The fire in St. Jude, that was what hospital can't come up. The stadium that you had. So what of sports? What of education? Or classic example, education. Do you know that Antigua got the latest campus of the University of the West Indies? The St. Ireland campus? You think Antigua was a head of solution in terms infrastructure, population, educated individuals? That Antigua has gotten its business right because Antigua is focusing on the social. They are aware of the need to bring Antigua more firmly into getting access to education for its citizens. And that's an example of what I mean. So those things that de-emphasize. This is also this company college. It's in a mess. That's the A-level college is in a mess. And nobody is talking about investing in the A-level college. That's where you get your kid of the crop, your future software engineers and so forth. So the social has been de-emphasized. And I'm saying to you, it has been de-emphasized largely on the consequence of that overwhelming inability to craft a response to the global economic challenges. I will test Barberas. And I will end in a while then, one last five more minutes, I will end on Barberas. I will give a little Barberas. I will test the debate about the free education thing under the last DLT administration. I said to that, I'm not Barberas, but I took my mouth in the business. I was writing all the time. And I was questioning, why are you letting Baro's legacy go to dust? And the arguments were, you know, we can't afford to pay for students again, the same neoliberal argument. And learn behold, we are more likely to get into office. And the same things that we were told could not be done. The first thing she did is give students free education. Okay? I couldn't understand how you have this fundamental transformative institution, if you want to call it that. And then you were playing neoliberal games with that because you falling for the old talk about the global environment. You were actually destroying Baro's legacy. And that's why the DLT can't win another election. And that's why in solution, you have this vacillation between the two parties since 2008. So I want to conclude now what is to be done. I have given you like what my view is a broad discussion. I hope I've done enough. But I want to give you a discussion. Oh, and an example I was giving about the Shafti period, the non participation in the FIFA World Cup. Okay? Something as fundamental as the youths play their football and have even if you don't, even if you couldn't qualify in Coca-Cola for football, but give the friend a chance to play their footballer, somebody will get picked on a, you know, somebody will discount it or something. So all of those things were an example of decay in so far as this thing called the fundamental, the social. And now we have the issue of crime. The issue of crime in relation to what we know, we all confine now with the gun violence. And of course, I forgot to mention the challenge of COVID and COVID was important because COVID placed the issue of human development at the center. In fact, COVID, I speak in a Marxist now on a politically COVID was proof that you had to invest in human beings, otherwise capitalism would collapse. But the COVID period is a clear example of which was a bit of my last discussion about what is to be done of how you marry social transformation with economic fundamentals. Now folks, when we build a bridge or highway or an airport, we do so on the basis that we're building infrastructure so that we can make, we can make money. So if you build an airport, if you improve your terminal, tourist will come into the country. When you build a bridge and a highway or a port, you improve the infrastructure to make economic activity possible. Why it is that we cannot understand that you invest in human capital if to give education to your citizens. This is tantamount to you building a bridge. And in the new economy, the so-called new knowledge economy, you invest in human capital and that human capital brings in revenue. You talk about the creative industries. In other words, music, sport, dance, fashion, you invest in human capital and then you, that brings in the revenue. So no longer is wealth to be made in a banana field. Wealth is not to be made in the very human being that we solution. We have clear and incontrovertible evidence that that is our main resource. We have produced two Nobel laureates. We produce musicians and dancers and artists. Now, how many Rihanna's? That's the solution. Only one Rihanna. One Rihanna is worth more than 10 years' edges. What about investment in software engineering? Those things that are making my point, in terms of this contradiction between economic development and social transformation, to resolve the contradiction by making your investment in social capital the basis for your economic development. A post-colonial state in the 21st century can have many other things on its agenda, some of them I didn't go into, but at the center of it is that because of the transformation of the world into the so-called rise of knowledge economy and in terms of the possibilities from creative industries, you place your emphasis there. A foreign service, our consulates, the same way in the old days, you're looking for investment or foreign investment, you can now spend your energies in my view trying to find ways in which you can tap into this world of that new area of human development that you can now use as a basis for transforming your society. That is my humble take on the question. I would now pause there and open up for some debate and some discussion and some feedback. Thank you very much. Thank you, Dr. Joseph. So we will now open up the floor to questions. I will ask that we keep the questions as precise as possible to the topic and just the floor is open and let's begin. I do have a question from Mr. Julian Dubois, the ambassador, and his question is, can you explain the evolution of the relationship that Martinique shares with France? Yeah, so I saw the Martinique question come up in the chat when I was talking. Now there are different colonial systems. So the difference between the British colonial system and the French colonial system, the British colonial system contain an element of a local elected assembly. So built into the British system was the possibility that one day the local element would have what is called self-government. The French system is based on a simulation in which the more progress you make, the more French you become. So you become France or through there. And so there is no room for our anti-colonial projects developed differently. Duke, you know when I was in my research on solution, I came across a woman called Helen M. Hinge, and she was writing a series called Alternatives to Independence. So she was arguing no long, and it's a thing I have very often among the French, even in our own Caribbean case, the BVI and the Texan Kiko, they still be those arguments. Well, you know, we gain so much more from being in the French, as with many colonies, that it's not worth, we are better off. Now, when they say that you are very off the head and contrasting it to Haiti, so Haiti is the best price. Oh, look, Haiti got its independence. So the short answer to you, Duke, is that there were different colonial systems, and those colonial systems led to a different kind of assumption of what post-colonial possibilities were. In the English-speaking Caribbean, there was always an understanding that your post-colonial possibilities resided in you, gaining your own sovereign apparatus and making those decisions. In the French case, it was an opposite. By the way, I'm not sure if we will all follow in the 90s, I think it was around 1998, no, the early 2000s, the upheavals in Martinique and Guadalup. So those upheavals over the price, they were over the price of goods, the same 2008 financial crisis led to a set of mass revolts in Martinique and Guadalup. And those mass revolts can be likened to the mass revolts that we went through in the Caribbean in the 1930s. Of course, the final story has not yet been told, but we can see, never assume that the question of sovereignty is closed, because there will be moments when a non-sovereign people find themselves so hurt by the colonial relationship that we don't know what their actions might be. So let's say, for example, a deeper economic crisis in France, we don't know. But the point is, that's the best I can tell you in relation to why Martinique and Guadalup, why the French colonies have not gone the independence route and why we have. Thank you for that. Dean Quinn James had his hand up and questions in the Q&A to the bottom of your screen. Let's see if we can find those. I can see two questions there. I can't. Can I read them? So that's conservation and figure. There's a current bureaucratic infrastructure support of first rate establishment and environment, which would which would have salivary social economic change based on global shifts. Okay, so, all right. So in other words, you're asking, but there's no difference between the bureaucratic infrastructure in San Lucia and the bureaucratic infrastructure in in in Antigua. What I would say to you is that now that the question of what you raise in there now is the question of the public service. And I didn't mention anything about the public service in my discussion about the post-colonial state and the colonial state. But the public service is a critical distinction between the two. In fact, one of my own letters was always used to tell me that the word public service only becomes relevant in a post-colonial situation. Because there was no public service during the called the the called the the colonial bureaucratic institutions were not meant to serve a public. They were meant to serve the colonial state. Now when so that's why we still have remnants of things like swearing oaths and oaths of secrecy. Because the post-colonial state, the colonial state during the colonial state, this is what Clark working for in 1940, working in the solution service, you must serve in the British colonial government. And therefore you had to you had to show more loyalty to the British colonial government than you would today local government. Now one of the debates about our post-colonial bureaucracy is that we should do away with many of the archaic bureaucratic structures. Because those archaic bureaucratic structures do not align with a free and independent people. Those archaic bureaucratic structures align with the whole colonial environment and reasonably so. But something like information when you when you make a when you put a let's say you make a request for concessions. There's no reason why that should be shrouded in mystery. Because you're now an independent citizen of Antigua or an independent citizen of San Lucia and you're now expecting your state to act on your behalf. So all of those so very interesting questions I would say to you the bureaucratic overhaul. I understand a civil service is concerned with things like with things like efficiency not but anti-corruption. But we should still make the point that very often many of the rules the civil service were colonial overhangs. Our court system too is an example of the colonial overhang. And we now need to when we speak of constitutional reform I think that Daniel will be doing this later on in the series. These are the kind of questions we should be asking. I don't think we when we speak of constitutional reform we start by asking the wrong questions. The right question should be what should a post-colonial constitutional framework look like? What are the things we need to overcome to make possible greater freedoms, greater economic participation and so on and so forth. So my answer to you my friend is that the bureaucratic system in Antigua and San Lucia are the same as we say in our in our way well and there is no I have no reason to believe that there's a difference between San Lucia and Antigua because we both inherited the same colonial institutions. Okay I have a hand raised by a Raphael St. Hill. So I'm going to allow him in to ask a question. Hi good night. Good night Paul and Chance Tennyson for this lecture. Thank you Corbett. You educated me in terms of reminding us of what Sir John was saying at his party's convention for independence and he pointed out that he wanted us to go to for tourism. You know Reflection 79 for the four years on you know that is what the present government are now talking they're pushing tourism same now progressive ministers of government are putting tourism the tourist dollar above social transformation. I don't know if you're aware of that. As you speak I said I was happy the last night I listened to Kenny Anthony's interview for 25 years of independence and he gave credit to Sir John both in Cuenan Patua and that was touch me and then tonight I'm listening to you. Do you know Tennyson that George Audlam the radical George Audlam actually wrote in his crusade in his paper that he has never been a member of a socialist party but there's one man who was I don't know if you know that in his studies John comes out as a member of the society. So John comes out as a more socialist he joined the freedom society and John and Audlam was proud to say he's never been a socialist. So I don't want to get involved in that but they see that we have to look at and post pre-independence from the guys who went to England to study the bar and Compton and Forbes Bonham and those guys. When they left they left England they came back to the islands what did they do compared to the post independence persons the University of West Indies graduates what did they do and I must listen to you because you know John Compton was against bananas the next six banana strikes in the valley was a fight against bananas in favor of sugarcane yet he was transformed to manage that banana economy as he saw it happen but I want to add in a conversation that is high time that you know we start looking in terms of policy because I look at the reconstitution of both political parties and I don't see much difference to them as a matter of fact um the river party has bell freedom and justice but they if you follow the United States party they talk about forming a middle class right yes I is what they are actually promoting what you talk about the local bourgeoisie should I do that there right yes although in my search though that I'm asking myself we are we before we as black people you know calling I mean the people like we had our could man mentality our mindset I remember joining in sport number the code message or what has happened to that we have moved away from that and I think suppose and musha we need to have the code man mindset back I mean people people and then what we are doing soon as soon as I were not in the conversation is that we have project manager we have so many consultants I remember John one has been at university whereas people talk about joining education we had the most the largest contingent of non-compass students in St. Augustine and Jamaica anyways John comes and paid I mean we are too many children as you called agronomists every other guy is going to ui to do agronomy up and I don't know what happened to them is that we are this what I want to discuss because come to us actually educating those guys and I must conclude by saying that I have to remember my friend Ufina Paul was a planner in agriculture who said that come then slam and that when she goes to a meeting instead of the agronomist advising him so what to do they wanted advice from him a farmer right and I do not see much difference because what I'm seeing now in a post 44 is after independence instead I'm seeing those guys with the masters and PhDs in his pop in the civil service the public service who are assertive and and and managing and getting things done I see in person who are now subservient to politicians politicians who are bought in political pockets right in national interest I do not know how we're going to resolve that I'm asking you what are your description for that thank you I don't know what to say except to tell you I agree with the first part the point you raised about the LSE remember these guys who are a lot of these guys what LSE the learning school of economics was actually CDN Beatrice Webb social democrat the Fabian Socialist who formed it so there was a man called Harold Lasky in fact when Compton first came back he said he was calling him Comptonist because of the influence of Harold Lasky so people like all of the I think the two Manly, Sir John, Barrow after himself was there doing his first person thought so so there was a Fabian in fact the Caribbean post-colonial project was Fabian Socialist the idea of intervening and so forth now I appreciate the point you made about Sir John and his policies you gave me a little more nuanced discussion but the point I was making is nobody said there's a broad I was giving you broad contours broad contours and that there were that doesn't mean he was not concerned about social transformation but I think the point is about the bananas for example in my research is he's actually talking to geese when he was minister of trade under the under the ministerial system Sir George Charles had responsibility for labour and Sir John had responsibility for trade and production and as a meeting I have it in my files I'm meeting with geese industries it's in the British colonial office where he's actually I'm encouraging geese but giving geese comfort that no we will not and then geese begins to articulate a very pro-compton policy because called them was the radical of the time so there are a lot of things we need to go into but the broad I take the broad point that you raised I would disagree with you though on the the what I would call the reductionist arguments about UV and so I mean I'm not different in UV but they cannot reductionist to say you know you wouldn't do this and you wouldn't do that it's an easy target an easy target I always responded by saying the university is not a monolithic institution the university is not a monolithic institution in which is a broad judge you have all types in there so so what I would say you and this and you with that I have said which you so first of all you is not a radical institution by stretch so very often we say oh the you radical that's not true at all so if you look at any of the let's say let's go back to the radical radical days you can count them on one hand so it's not like there are hundreds of lecturers but you know you know three who are in the news so so so let's not let us not you know bring it on to you we didn't do this and you didn't do that the point is we are challenged now and that's why I agree with you in terms of identifying critical and innovative ways of using our intellect and our policy making capacity to devise creative ways of resolving those both the economic and the social development challenges that you see and that's what I was trying to propose some of those things in the end although my my proposals are neither exhaustive nor in any way fully refined that's where I think our energies have to go because the global economic crisis will continue there is nothing is there's no end in sight but we cannot we cannot rely on this argument oh your tourism argument I agree with you so remember I said to you the shift to place the shift from tourism from agriculture to tourism and services to place under Kenny Anthony but there are limits to what a tourism is product can do we know all of these arguments against tourism how it siphons wealth it is it is based on expatriate capital locals have no role to participate except in terms of so we know the problems that's why I was making the case for for other things other areas of development that place empowerment in our hands and not just building a hotel in a different let me give you an example profile so Airbnb for example so there's technology called Airbnb that can make ordinary solutions participate in the tourism industry so we have what a market called shifts in the economic infrastructure that make new possibilities close at hand and so it's not just a question of saying we know what the transit stories are but we can now develop a local bourgeoisie or a local a way in which we can have local participation so these are things that our creative policy makers need to put their minds to because that's how you have the social transformation but at the center of it things we put in solutions and we are making a point when you transform that little boy when you give him software engineering skills that little boy can now develop a new app and bring in revenue to the country when you when you teach the children music and guitar you can have a you can have a reanna you can have a full of talent that is one thing I can tell you about Caribbean populations we have a comparative advantage in our artistic capacities there is no running away from it so let's invest let's invest in that a little more and go from this traditional development thing innocent one final question you know as you're speaking there right I want to ask you have you ever thought of junior colleagues thinking of cooperative republics not like like for what food what fobs tried because the bath region in Spain it's really a cooperative area bigger than an experiment is that it's a very successful example like we're talking about and we go to Israel the kibbutz the village tourism the kibbutz are run by students when I went there the last time was students running the kibbutz so why can't we have in that village tourism a concept of cooperatives and I must add and and was enough to research the last people we had on the policy on cooperatives was in 1974 when and jim dibuski was the minister of community and cooperatives and he had a policy on cooperatives tenison they started going to teach cooperatives in schools yes jim dibuski right in 1970 for the policy on cooperatives we have stopped all the things and therefore in because economic cake is so small it's much smaller now than before right we need people to come together that is what I think we need that to think that that you don't really know yes we'll have to lose her but if we could make instead of running have like the possible to be a cooperative man have 10 000 um and and and the four forms was and booze right i'd be fed up to one riana that you could think in molding our people into working together that could make a lot of money and you know you know you know you know study that needs to be done to rafael the study of the ssbj but i think what i what is the why study you know you actually had a cooperative system in place there and actually so but the the other point i want to remind you to remember that this is called neoliberalism so when you say jmd had the study on cooperatives dominant orthodoxy now is not on cooperative modes of economic organization so the neoliberalists want to blame the new generation of students now the neoliberal economists this whole washington consensus and private sector-led growth that's where the problem starts so again i keep making the point about the kind of ways in which we start to think for ourselves and and so i remember talking to callix jordan he gave me a very interesting idea about um passion fruit he said when you go to spain and the man have his vineyard to the sink his wine it's a passion fruit if you imagine everybody in tenlusha have a little passion fruit going in there in the little backyard and you have wine you can actually have a new ferment that into wine so this is that kind of thing i agree with you cooperative systems are alternatives to individualistic neoliberal private mark private capitalist modes but we have not been taught to think in those counter counter hegemonic ways and that's why we our economists can't think of those things and our state planners can't think of those things i'm not talking now i'm just telling you the training and what they're supposed to and what they told the world can and cannot allow has limited them but you historical knowledge which is which i think is what we all need you can go back and show how a historical knowledge of those things can inform our actions in the present okay i'm going to in the interest of fairness take a question i'm going to go back and forth we have hands up and we have lots of questions coming in so i have a question from john jack thanks for mentioning antiga does the current bureaucratic infrastructure in st lusha support of frustrate establishing an environment which would accelerate socio-economic change based on current global shifts and recommendations and then i i think i had answered that at the first one remember when i read that questions from the company or you did john jack questions so the net there okay that is that was my mistake i'm sorry about sure i have a i have a question then from um anslam g was the colony better equipped to handle crime and and corruption answer but remember the colony was made to control populations so that so what we call crime and corruption what we call crime and corruption today is not what we don't have a colony would have seen it a colony would have seen it as bandits and people over people who are challenging the state authority and so i it's not a fair question what i would tell you is that the colonial state is in fact so so give an example and send the warships this will come into the harbor so whenever there is a little disturbance the warship will come into the harbor i'm not comfortable answering you has to whether or not the the colonial state is better equipped because i'm telling you there are two different conditions the first condition is a state that is acting on behalf of british oppressive forces and the second one is a post-colonial one that is dealing with our population so when we when we speak of crime and corruption now is a different rationale we now want to protect our citizens from criminals and they want to protect our our our systems from from malpractice and so forth so so it's not a fair question answer and that doesn't but i can tell you it's like comparing chop and cheese okay um thank you dr joseph um i have a question from tanya alphonse tanya yes good night can you hear me we can hear you okay um okay thank you um my contribution well it's going to be very brief first i'd like to say um i was very moved by the um presentation that dr tenison joseph gave it was very interesting to hear a little bit about um the state in the colonial times however my concern now i'm a teacher and my concern is about the youth and i like the word this is why i joined um this webinar because um this the um social transformation part of it grabbed grabbed me in so i joined in um i'm very concerned about our youth in st lucia now simply because we have the youth when you look at the prison population we have a large number of our youth in prison we when you look at the schools a large number of the schools um we have issues with the discipline discipline of the students their behavior a lot of them when you look closely you see they have criminal tendencies and stuff like that and it is all because of the households they grow up in now this is what we call a social issue and um dr tenison joseph i remember you teaching me politics what and politics too before you went away to do your your masters at the time that was in 1997 i believe and i remember we had some debates on those but it's a social issue that means it affects a large sector a large part of the society is long-standing and all of that makes it a social issue and of course now it becomes the um i would think it becomes the responsibility now of the government to find some form of um solution to that and because of that i am very i am one who thinks that we should at least with all the great social scientists we have you dr tenison joseph being one of them we should have persons coming together to sit and plan i believe um the way forward for some kind of social restructuring to address these matters i am not too well versed in social um transformation but i can pinpoint a lot of things that um from my limited view i can pinpoint a lot of things that's affecting it for example um employment when we look at um the um a large number of the kids at our school their parents are employed by the hotel at the hotels and um that contributes to lack of supervision because the parents spend a very long time at the hotels i am even i know of a particular case where a parent they go in the morning they go in there's the morning shift and then they're given one hour to go back to return for the night shift now when you have a parent working like that what time does that parent have to supervise he's over a child okay then um there is the the other part of it um economic we do not have what you have what you call the minimum minimum i think minimum wage or minimum bigger pattern no sorry i said wages yes we don't have that and i i this is something i experience a lot at the schools it is very difficult to teach children who are hungry they're not focused they mean their primary their primary um goal is not to listen to you they don't want to say anything about mathematics or it when i teach they're hungry they need to be fed and you you find how am i going to say i don't want to say anything to but we need to look at that because the wages we need to have a certain a minimum wage where that people can survive off of it parents some parents make a sorry where they only have just enough money to pay their bus their transportation fees to go to and promote for the month this is the reality of the situation um another thing again that's contributing to um well from my perspective there we have um the police um and i'm going to be brave to speak on that the police does not respond to a lot a lot of um cases involving um a prime where the kids are involved for example i teach at a particular school and sometimes you have um you have um fights and stuff breaking out right there in front of the police station and they do nothing about it you call them they do not respond it's like there is no it's like our whole society to me there we need to do something about it to um to bring it back to where i think it was when i was a little girl it was a much pleasant place to live in st luccia you could leave your door open and you could go anywhere you could go to the market return and everything would be fine and it's not like that anymore so i personally from my limited view i think that we need to do some real restructuring and the thing is we could talk all the economics we could put all the economic structures in place we could go out there get it and put it but who are we putting it there for dr tennyson joseph you said something very important we need to invest in our people and one thing i see right now we need to save the youth something has to be done to save them and somebody has to speak up about it okay um one more thing i want to touch on i like that um our part um well i like that the new government is talking about um the youth economy and um you said that um well you noticed that we have a lot of brilliant musicians and i i too i am aware of that i know a lot of them the young ones especially when um the venezuelan embassy had this collab with the st luccia school of music we had the st luccia national the st luccia national orchestra music orchestra and that was so beautiful to hear and to sit down and listen to them and i am very happy that the jazz is coming back on stream but given the fact that we we want to to create this avenue for our youth to take advantage of everything i have not really um apart from the st luccia school of music taking advantage of the jazz um the time this jazz time there are some kids there's the young ones out there who would not in collaboration with the st luccia school of music and they do have their jazz bands they have performed at other places but i have not seen them on a lineup so to speak for um jazz performances and um i'm just curious about that yeah right so you said a lot to us but i just said two things to you and tanya so i like your last example because i want to be prescriptive so the thing is the music so i imagine a policy in which every school primary school and infant school has music on the curriculum and every child can learn to play a musical instrument by the age of or just be exposed to a musical instrument foreign language is the same thing so these are not these are not hard to do you know these are just employing enough people with the right skills in the education system zone in the country so that would be that would be my answer to you in relation to not just creating reanna like i didn't want to make the point about reanna i'm making the point that we now have to invest because this the young boy in in in mongu which is chosen we do not know if he might be the best guitarist in the world but he's never held one in his life or basic music theory and those things so we can do that as the kind of let us wish we view our curriculum to those things and the same thing and go to other other skills to like drama and dance now the question you raised about the when you began about the crime so tanya the the question now is you know i was talking broad social policy but there is lower level social policy in relation to social work and counseling and psychology now these are the kind of things you need investment in too so so so that is also part of social transformation okay so so so you what you did was give us a very beautiful description a horrendous one of those what causes sighted problems so the overwork parents the low wages but another level you need governmental intervention to deal with so so but this cost these things normally cost money and normally cost cost money instead of training people as well but i'm making the point that we cannot we cannot keep playing this we cannot we cannot keep widening this false dichotomy between cost economic cost and social transformation but you said a lot more but i don't really want to go into all of it i appreciate your comments but the two things i want to leave you i want to respond to essentially is an elaboration of the policy how do we move this thing into a broad policy which we expose our our young people to all kinds of things around which they can develop their social skills and make livings out of it make make a living out of it and it's no longer a case where i'm sure many of us are young parents now our parents didn't want us to learn to play to play football or because they wanted us to be to go to school but we all of us in this room though now better we go better than that now we can see on tv we'll make it we'll make it all the money and so forth it is the footballers and the cricketers and so forth so if we're not we're not if we're not reinventing the wheel here we say let us now invest that's what we have and the other point is the point about the crime and so forth that is a that is a call for certain levels of social intervention in terms of social workers social care psychologists and counselors which we have not been spending a lot of attention to a game because we are de-emphasizing the the social we put them in jail we deal with them at the end point the police at the prison we build the boseju we build a the bodily but we are not dealing with it at the other point which is to prevent them from becoming us so that's my that's my response to you thank you tanya for that contribution unfortunately all good things must come to an end we have reached our time and now i see darryl has a question darryl will you make that short and sweet i didn't write it so it could have been right we have a number of questions in there unfortunately we weren't able to get to all of them um maybe the consulate can consider starting a little earlier or something so that we can accommodate as many questions and as many people as possible because it looks like independence dialogue Tuesdays is becoming quite popular so um you want to go ahead darryl or should i i can i was the politics changed since 79 and i put the question based on uh early observation regarding the similarities in the party's constitutions and even the fact that they perhaps the front side of the coin um in terms of the emphasis on social um stability social social emphasis based on even the different sides of the same coin how do you think the is a shape the way the politics has been conducted okay so that's sorry because you're again you're going in and out but i read your question i read your question and i heard your your i heard the juice of what you were asking how was the question about the similarity between the two parties and how has politics changed again i want to just basically i know we went out of time our our our chair din has put us on notice i want to give a quick a quick response to you remember the 19 the the the blood global radical agenda collapsed in 19 it collapsed in 19 let's call it let's just say 1990 but the beginning of the collapse was that long that long decade in fact we had our first collapse in the cadre of the digital revolution and after that the possibilities for radical agenda were all downhill so our politics became centrist and then you had broader emphasis on the neoliberal thing the washington consensus so our politics became centrist so then the similarities the differences have narrowed because they all dealing with um they all so if anything the moral radical part of the now mildly social democratic and the conservative ones are very are still very much into into the economic fundamentalism which i was talking about i would wonder and i have to do it in this form we saw the emergence of a brand of neoliberalism that we had never seen in solution politics before since your uncomfortable right and that brand of neoliberalism was not unexpected because of the global shift to neoliberal it was unexpected to me i didn't i didn't expect to see taking the root in solution the way it did to the point of having political success but that's an error of my my own my own life politics but the fact of the matter is it cannot be ignored directly in explaining the because remember you had the trump phenomenon the trump phenomenon globally is an example of that neoliberal thing where a businessman coming to office and all of the arguments are the same that basically you need you need the um the so-called correct politicians a waste of time and you need a businessman because his success as a business makes him qualified for for political leadership is the first time since plato that was ever said if you read plato plato actually says the opposite businessman and producers do not govern now the trump phenomenon is what i think is what i think they're the the shift to a pure neoliberal type has emerged but i do not think i honestly do not think it hits a looser so hard that that that will go maybe be naive again i don't think we will see a continuation of it but my knowledge of history tells me like it's like a volcanic eruption if it happens once if vessel vias explodes once vessel vias can explode again if you have a 7.8 um magnitude earthquake in the year in the year 1880 then you got 7.8 magnitude in the year 3025 so the fact that it has happened is a new political reality that we need to bear in mind i would also say that well about the political parties all of them have moved to this image making thing so what my friend um brother the brother who was talking about cooperatives and things or was sent here was trying to explain there was that particular kind of politician he never wanted money the person who was doing the house to house for him didn't want money what we have now we have marketers so you're bringing the so-called barbarian and politics electoral gurus and they're just marketing people and so that's what that's what the parties have become i mean now we now let's focus on content and policy and real we now we're now dealing with let's win the election and do all the razz batazz and both political parties have taken that is why by the way you can have certain neoliberal types emerging because i can market you i can market you and have a speech writer for you even if you can make a speech yourself and that i think is what is happening our politics which i think is in line with what i call global neoliberalism and the shift to individualism and post-modernism and dualistic these are impacting on our politics in various ways and that's what i think my best answer to you in relation to how the politics has changed and how the how the parties have become more and more and more similar and so on and so forth but i continue to rail against it because that's the most i can do okay dr. Joseph um i've just been given a green light to go until 10 are you okay with that okay i'm enjoying this i'm enjoying this dialogue okay excellent excellent i will take a question from the awesome i will take a question from the from the from the attendees and this one is from a dr alvin abraham um what is your perception of the failure of the west indies federation i guess or he says federal in affecting progressive social development especially in the oecs yeah so i think um another but remember i was saying doctor that the question of post-colonial options are very complex i mean we for our purposes tonight reduced it to to um to social transformation but i think it's a very complex one of the features of the post-colonial thing is how you enlarge your sovereignty so that was a debate at the time when we were going to independence whether you have viable states or whether you're too small and one of the ways in which they overcame this problem of the viability of the sovereignty was to was to engage in the federation and once the federation collapsed we were left on our own that's why we ended up in this choose a barbarian open after for the poor ricky a poor ricky independence but i was i if i had had the time doctor i would have had some discussion about when i was giving my my prescriptions in the end on my paper i had gianna gianna's oil and i had the federal the federation the federation so we cannot now so all of what we were discussing just now dr abra we were discussing that within the context of a narrow solution experience but the narrow solution experience is not the beginning and end of our sovereign possibilities our sovereign possibilities can be widened in the first instance of the oecs which i think we have some real capacity for in relation to our historical time what we already have on the agenda which we often don't celebrate enough the free movement of people and so forth but i do not think what in other words i i make that point in barbarism all the time we have exhausted the possibilities of our single territory independence that's a fact or in other words everything you can put across the business and that's a room to go but if you think you like barbarism everything about this is possible to do in terms of the only thing they're not talking about building offshore islands you know that that's the way it has gotten like in dubai those places but in other words we now have to move the thing from the because we cannot the oecs is a natural place by which you expand that sovereignty now i have gianna on my little my little list here because i just came from gianna last week and my friends we there's a revolution taking place in gianna over the oil so gianna's economy grew by 60 something percent it was the fastest growing economy in the world and they have massive revenue from oil and gianna is now trust me when i say that you can quote me on that in 10 years gianna will be the center of caribbean development that plan is to to move into manufacturing and to it's a it's a massive plan the last budget was was being read whenever said now i i i do not see how we in the caribbean facing our economic challenges cannot begin i wrote my article for the weekly paper which is due on thursday and i was making the point but caricum has not articulated a space for itself in this gianna that gianna revolution taking place there so to answer your to answer your question brother we cannot run away from the fact that there is a point at which the individual possibilities of a small island state to transform itself peacefully is going to be reached we had the historical example of the federation which will never disappear as one of our possibilities and we also have the concrete reality of our OECS which is a stepping stone into the future but so i definitely think again our foreign policy experts who are in the room part of our our our our intellectual energies if i you see if i wasn't an academic i do like thanks for with you this is this is that thing i have in draft if i wasn't an academic i would be writing a manifest what i would call the integration manifest i have it in draft but nobody would take this seriously the integration manifest though in which you now begin to make it a grassroots social movement the one thing missing in all of our attempts at federation is that we've never had a social movement at the grassroots level for caribbean unification we've had social movements in everything we have social movements in religion in church that defy the social movement everything by what a legalization homosexual rights all of those things we have social movements in those things we don't have a social movement i can't think of one that exists at the caribbean social movement for integration and i think if i were not not living this life and i were living the life of a public activist that would be on my agenda but i certainly think we have to as as as policy makers and so forth begin to put that on the agenda because our limited small island sovereignty there's a there's a limit to what we can do we can do this and it certainly will come back on the agenda especially the global economic crisis is going to continue hey thank you dr Joseph and i have a question from uh cohen cohen james i'm going to open up the floor to cohen hi how are you good night to all um i hope we're mottable and claire yeah you loud and clear okay thanks um so i'm listening i'll start off with the question the colonial state and the post-colonial state dr tennyson where would you say we are in terms of the transition from that state have we transitioned or are we still transitioning and if so if we are still transitioning how far do we have to go in terms of time or in terms of circumstances and conditions because i'm listening um well i mean i have more but i don't know if you want to take it now and and then i continue or you want me to just let me let me take this one first so very good question so it's never it's never an end point but i will give you some i will give you some examples of where we are so let's take something like okay i know gmail is going to talk about transitionary form so let's take something as basic as and that one is symbolic but it's basic important something like the the monarchy that's an example of an unfinished political agenda so you can you can actually put the put the opinion and say we look well we got independent 79 we kept the queen of our head of state barbarous to the step of getting rid of it so you can actually point to a generation and say put that on your agenda and i think solution but of course again typical of solution you're having a mention of it but never a follow-up action um another example was your judicial authority the ccj same thing so you got so i can point to you quen about these uh now notice what i'm doing is not giving you an economic example i'm giving you constitutional example these are easier to do the economic ones are more complex that there's never an end point to that because let's say for example imperialism is always imperialism always moves the point is you can you you can develop a situation in which you are aware of what the colonial tradition is and you are actively looking to let's say for example the point that but a central race in response to my question the development of a local entrepreneurial class so we had that post independence but then you heard something like you forget what neoliberalism did let me give you an example so we had something called um aliens land holding licenses and aliens land holding acts that's an example of a post-colonial strategy that means well our country is small so we're going to put this to the extent to which aliens can own land that's an reasonable post-colonial strategy then you have neoliberalism and it says well no no no no no you cannot put restrictions on foreign capital and therefore you should ease up those alien land holding policies because it is preventing you from so what i'm saying to you quen the struggle is eternal it's never stopped because well now now that you responded now that you responded it sounds like we have a long way to go because you did mention um you did mention i well i want to call it the culture how much of the colonial culture has been brought in so for say for example the police force some people say it shouldn't be called police force it should be called police service um and you mentioned when the warships came into the harbor what it came to do you know um and you just mentioned some of the the legal the constitutional stuff um even our parliamentary system um is it is it patterned from from back there you know um i'm stuff like that and based on and on the economic side too i mean while listening to the discussion i was thinking to myself okay post independence or post colonial we are we are into bananas and then like you said tourism was a plan from sir john way back then and the slp government had had the task of really doing that transformation when the banana really got got got got in trouble um but i'm seeing in the in the colonial setting you were there to serve the the colonial masters i forgot the term that you use um but the bananas is still being is still feeding the colonial masters the tourism is in a sense entertaining and providing relaxation for the colonial masters and then i mean i i'm happy you brought up the point after because when you were speaking about it i was thinking to myself that one of the few ways that we could really really get out of it is via population explosion because then you you have enough to kind of serve with yourself so to speak but and then you brought up the point about the federation and carry calm and stuff like that so i was thinking yes you know but in a sense we still there and then you brought up the arts as well um which i have always thought because i had a little bit of involvement in the music and they tell you for an artist to stand out you have to have something unique about yourself and i've always said that one of the issues we've had with solution art and why we are not getting out there is because we are trying to do what is out there we need to do our own and and and i'm and i'm and the denry segment is an example of that the denry segment they sing they sing our culture they sing what we would see and and that is new and refreshing to the air outside there and it has proven that they have they have gotten places you know obviously i think it's still need some refining and some development but you know back to your your your thing we have to use what is ours and then you spoke about there was something you spoke about teaching in all schools but i think it has come to a point where creole should be taught in all schools i know i i was told at some point there was a drive to do it that's awful but i think it should be in all schools now because it is one of the things that makes us unique it is one of the things that gives us our culture gives us culture and and and living here in the united states i see among among among us yes that's our you know that culture has not it has kind of been taken away so we try to adopt a culture here and we saw we in a state of confusion a little bit um and i'm not just talking about like somebody like me who came here recently i'm talking about you know from from way back when and um so you know and and and that's the other thing about this country it's so culturally rich in that diverse and people stick and stand with the culture and if you have no culture where are you you have to try to find yourself somewhere you know you know what you have just done you know what you have just done first when you've done a balance sheet that's why i tell you the very complex question so you did a very excellent balance sheet of things to do things not to do what can be done but excellent so that's why i tell you it continues all the time so and i like the examples about music so it's a very remember this thing is a very complex thing like you could go into religion and a whole set of things culture so if you want to undo that you cannot even know you don't know where to start but the point i'm making is and what i saw coming from you is a consciousness of it so once you have conscious of it then you and you have different you have different that's what the word is of emphasis there might be somebody you want to call remember what i read from josey maybe somebody who's into culture by telling you you need to transform so on so on so on so into culture there's somebody who might be to economy might be telling you you need you need local manufacturing or so the thing is a real complex web of but the fact is we are a small island of the state we have we are moving incrementally in a context that we move from colonialism to post-colonialism but then we face continual challenges and as you rightly said we now look it inward and out to see how we can respond but you did a very good balance sheet of of pros and pros what to do what and i know i didn't want you to feel don't feel what i say about it either you see there's a tendency you can feel it's so overwhelming you can end up feeling i'm defeated but just remember one other space if you have space in the cultural space you get your energy from that my space is a political academic space i get my i get my energy from that other people have other other spaces they get the energy from but we're fighting a battle together thank you co-in for that um uh contribution and for the question um i'm going to take one question from john mangal and he's asking moving forward in light of the external threats by the war in ukraine on our food security how do you think we should approach this with so much emphasis on tourism at the expense of our food security keep in mind garner's approach to cut exports to switzerland and produce and produce i'm sorry and and produce their own chocolate have resigned ourselves to primary production and not add value to what we produce very good so again the question of food security but uh but a fra fra is an example of the the another question that my friend didn't even mention so food sovereignty and food security is another even feature of a post-colonial state i said to you that's a very complex thing so rave rave 1000 this book on kaibyan civilization it makes a point about a staple grain and i think i like that point he says i'm from for that every civilization has a grain so in some places it's rice it is wheat it is um in our case in our own kaibyan we had our brain you know we had we had um in the pre-colonial period we had uh we had maize by ox and we had we had cassava now there are two views of food sovereignty one view is and i like the one with a staple grain one view of food sovereignty is you have something that the community in the worst case scenario the community can eat you know what you you can you can eat that and for the next 50 years but you're eating that thing okay like some place rice you know i know rice is such only but so our policy planners should start by thinking of because in terms of wall the second world war in the kaibyan and barbarians always boast about that there was the one time when barbarians were self-sufficient in food was during the second the second world war when the boats the boats were used were requisitioned for for um for use in naval battles real solution any kaibyan tradition starts start there let us look at what a basic staple is that we know in times of war in times of famine in terms of hurricane everybody in solution have that that's the one way of thinking of food security there's another bourgeois version of security which is i am an economist friend of mine talking about saying well you know um food security is having on your plate all the basic nutrients that you need now that was that was a little i call it the bourgeois version you know it's local it's one great thing right i'm half if you you need protein you need but but but so far you're correct so the one you create another feature of that sovereign question is this question of food security and and i do not think that the way in the kaibyan as they're as challenged on that as we're making ourselves out to be that is one fish y'all don't have functions the right so they say what is it potato just peas potato and queso right is the first piece i would not wait till here once you have those once you have those you're good and we can okay something like self-sufficiency self-sufficiency in chicken and egg production we can start there the same way i said have a system where you teach children music in schools you can start from a policy where there are certain foods that we can have self-sufficiency in in that we just don't have to we don't have to impart it at all and we don't focus on those things our agricultural policy and so on and we can do that and that is how i understand frafra food security not only in the context of war in ukraine but as a permanent feature as rafgandam says of a civilization every civilization should have its grain are you starting from there what is your what is your brain that you have that you know you're going to survive on come with me thank you um i'm going to take one more question from the attendees and it's going to come from jeremiah norbert i'm going to open the floor to jeremiah jeremiah good night dr joseph hi jerry yeah um let me first comment you for a wonderful session i i happened to join even before the session started so i found the moderators and them i caught them whispering before we actually started just to show you um that i had a keen interest in listening and i'm very happy with the discussion and the course that this discussion took tonight however um i don't know my thinking is that we look at i know we spoke about you you mentioned colonialism and you mentioned the post-colonial period and you said i mean during the colonial period they were trying to achieve well they were only focused on two things um i don't know if my mind allows me to see right now the era that we're in i know we consider post-colonialism whether we're seeing past these two things or whether we're still in the same um or maybe a more neocolonial type of of era because when we look at tourism compared to the times of of the plantation economy we still see quite a few similar traits within the two of them in terms of who the owners are who the workers are how the profits are repatriated and whatnot and i asked myself looking at where we are now in 2023 um and in terms of achieving the socio-economic transformation that we're trying to we we want to achieve do we have as a small island development state do you think that we have real capacity i mean let's just be honest because i think you call frafra john mongal said we look at the external factors you say when when did they metropause cough or when they sneeze we can actually call here in the caribbean and they say i heard a lot of talk about investing our people investing our people so a lot of our investing depends on the i mean we come under the hard and fast rule or we come you have places like the IMF and the cdp you go to them it's not like yourself sustainable you go to these agencies for funding this funding comes with certain rules and prerequisites there are some things that you have to do you have to abide by some things which does not give you the ability to be able to use the monies or invest it in the way that you want so yes we may want certain things yes we may want i agree that we should invest in in in our people i agree that 100 percent and i share that same sentiment but do you really have the ability as a small island developing state and that's why i like the idea of of the federation and and i think that the federation can achieve can set out to achieve a lot more than when we go and negotiate because one of the things i take serious issue with is that even in the caribbean region you look at the way that we negotiate to me really bothers me especially as a young individual when we negotiate or when you hear i'm certain prime ministers make when they have conversations it's like Saint Lucia does not negotiate on the fact that boy we have two beautiful pitons and we sell ourselves as you know we want investors to come it's like we have to give investors or give into what investors are asking because if you don't do it um Gaston Brown will do that until you know he's going to give them what you're not giving them or i'll do it across there and so either you give in or you lose an opportunity um so i don't know if i want to know your honest opinion do you believe that we have the ability to really accomplish that type of socioeconomic transformation that we're looking for as small island developing states all right and i i'm honest honest i i always try to be honest i'll give you an honest answer i will but just listen to you before i do i forgot to mention something in relation to quen quen was talking i wanted to make a point that i think was important when he was trying to weigh and if i help you if i help you clarify my answer to you jerry when he was asking about you know the kind of frustration about whether you decolonize or not i wanted to make the point that sometimes it's not it's not a or b so let's just go back to the banana question so there were many there were several factors quen about the bananas which point and suggest view colonialism but i also made the point that in there you had certain things which were positive in terms of your ownership of your own land i'm sorry jerry maya for me to appreciate what i'm saying there in other words when you move from tourism to bananas you lost two things too because you lost that idea of my own part of ground i'm a producer and so forth there was there were other elements in the thing so let's not think of it as as a hard and fast a or b black or white inside the thing you have no one says that you can work not so jerry maya good question about neocolonialism and that's why he was trying to say to quen to it's an ongoing battle i always try to be optimistic i that you know uh what is the name graph she graph she always said i maintain an optimism of the of the the will despite the pessimism of the intellect so over time look at us look at us over time how how our children speak see how knowledgeable they are and over time there has been that transformation in our society of course bearing in mind what tanya was pointing to the other side our lost generations of young people and so forth which you must pay attention to but i can see i can see evolution over generations our grandfather's time to our time and you can also do the balance sheet gains and losses so the question about neocolonialism i think is important but so when when you're raised about the imf i was asking the question of the example i was giving mother with this for example with the aliens land holding licenses and i was saying there is in fact a reality in which some of the things which the post-colonial state was able to do it is not being told it is no longer able to do on the basis of economic limitations of debt problems balance of payments problems and go to the imf these are facts these are facts the double army you invest in you invest in infrastructure and social development and you you take loans for that and then you pay a price in terms of going to the imf will then limit you but i do not think jerry that the answer is to assume lack of capacity because there are ways in which there are ways in which creative economists have dealt with those matters i also think that as i was trying to conclude the two things are not mutually incompatible the two are not mutually incompatible so so so there's a way in which the imf for example focuses on if we don't play direct investment in social services for its own reason but at the same time you can invest in human capital you can use the world bank and so forth to invest in human capital so i think there are there are ways in which we can do but also the federal the question of the the original options there are also new ways in terms of climate change and so on and so forth in which you can make money i kind of is a good example of what they're doing with the the carbon mutual policy being paid by norway and my house for preserving the forest there are ways in which the same way i was making a point about the creative industries there are ways in which we can look at where the new global environment is and tap into ways in which we can bring finance into our country that can free us of some of the strictures of the of the imf so don't so so don't take the blanket thing about imf and even even the imf itself has transformed so we're now hearing about um more i um um more kind of notions about development with the human face and so forth so it's not that we the the thing is struggle there's a way there are ways in which states and the communities can struggle once you know what the struggle is but but it's a good example of what my what my model is doing on the global on the global stage again i'm raising questions about creative foreign policy the way you put yourself globally there are ways in which you can find those things which i don't think would allow us to reach a blanket conclusion to say that in this current era we cannot do those things because the imf the imf says i gave you the example of the administration that did it in the era of the global economic crisis in the era of the global economic crisis most thousand uh post post um you had all of the some of the most remarkable advances in caribbean solutions social development most the most ever in the history of the post-colonial history of solution so don't tell me you can't don't tell me you can't you can't do it you can't do it with political will thank you Dr Joseph and thank you Jeremiah for asking that question so this really is our closing again all good things must come to an end thank you immensely Dr Joseph your presence here tonight was very very very much appreciated you can tell from the responses from the questions being asked that this this topic has quite a bit of relevance on the hearts and minds of solution so we appreciate you come in in here tonight and enlightening us on on the topic and for just you know giving us your your perspective on on and answering all these questions so thank you again thank you kindly um and while I'm in the process of thanking I want to thank the folks over at um the councilate um especially ambassador du Bois thank you sir for accommodating um dialogue independent independence dialogue Tuesdays um I want to thank the folks over at GIS Joshua Venor thank you very much sir for keeping us alive and streaming in all platforms and for just making this possible really appreciate you I I really like it when a good plan comes together um I would also like to thank um again all the folks over oh boy I had a whole list I'm starting to sound like the Academy Awards now um so yeah so all the folks over at Diaspora Affairs and the various missions and councilates thank you very much for your participation I want to announce next week's um Independence Day topic will actually be on two will actually be on Wednesday because next week um Tuesday is uh Valentine's Day so we're going to have it on Wednesday and the topic is going to be um the role of culture in the struggle for independence so we're going to have presenter Raisa Joseph the executive director of the Folk Research Center and we're hoping to include more senior um Anthony on that panel as well so again I want to say thank you folks at GIS thank you very much for extending the time we know it's late over there in Saint Lucia so um thank you very much and for all the participants thank you for the questions my apologies for not being able to get to each and every question um hopefully we can extend these talks and have these talks a little bit more often because they are relevant to what's going on in our society in our economy in our nation so let's get all those points of views out there and let's continue the talk so again I want to say thank you look out for us next Wednesday when we talk about um the role of uh culture post independence and I would like to say good night farewell and um thank you very much again good night and god bless thank you good night dim very good night water russia thank you sirs all right you take care we're ending now thank you have a pleasant night all right