The approach of the Mottley administration to the future of the Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation, the nation’s state broadcaster in its 60th year, must not be on par with the myopic decision-making that led the previous regime to deprive Barbadians albeit briefly of free university education.Instead of asking how we fund public education given its role in fighting inequality for half a century and building up the human capital of a nation whose own natural resource is its people, the result was a binary “sell or keep and defund” policy. How can a nation’s riches grow with such impoverished thinking? Public policy should be more than market-driven, neoliberal economics.The same mistake has been made with LIAT (regional air transport), Transport Board (public transport), Barbados National Bank (indigenous banking), and ICBL ( insurance), to name but a few. And each time, in a bid to save a nation’s riches we are all left poorer, trapped in a misery-go-round at the mercy of the Almighty Market.Rather than focus on the public service values and mission of state agencies and enterprises, ministers continue to call an organisation’s name, glance at its balance sheet and weigh it against the priorities not of a developing nation and democracy but against a ledger in the Ministry of Finance, its lines and margins created for it by the International Monetary Fund.
