If weaving dreams is a Caribbean past-time, selling them is more than a livelihood, it’s an industry. For many islands, fabricating fantasies to fetch foreigners’ dollars is institutionalised as a collective occupation and even subsidised by the State under the umbrella of tourism. For us, papering over the cracks is something of an extreme sport. The idea of putting on a show—or keeping up appearances in order to attract foreign investment—is important even to our indigenous entrepreneurship, and central to the adventure of “making it” in the Caribbean.
The showmanship of traditional Carnival artforms like calypso, extempo, limbo and steelpan actually provide even deeper insight into how we use discernment, improvisation, negotiation and inventiveness to “make it” in the Caribbean, the late intellectual Lloyd Best used to say. Calypsonians watch over our world, and wield the powerful political weapons of wordplay, satire and ridicule with laser-like precision. The playful lyrical warfare of extempo, on the other hand, showcases our capacity for good humour, quick wit and raw ingenuity.
Limbo dancers embody our seemingly infinite ability to negotiate difficult circumstances. And the invention of the steelpan, created from castoffs of a global hydrocarbon extraction industry, remains a remarkable testimony to Caribbean people’s talent to perceive unseen value and transform the worthless into the world-class.
And yet, while the Caribbean produces champions of calypso and masters of mamaguy, the region as a whole demonstrates strong susceptibility to corporate double-speak and weak resistance to political deception. Why is this? Are we so intent on attracting the foreign investment that we totally deactivate the watchdog instinct of our inner calypsonian, and lose the eternal scepticism of extempo? Are we so intimidated by multilaterals’ hurdles to development that we forget how to throw our heads back and limbo under them? Or have we so lost faith in our own ability to create that we need to look for ideas and validation from others?
Whatever the reason, we do seem to make ourselves easy targets for the thinly veiled exploits of multinational corporations. Telecommunications giants, for example, are allowed to bind and sadistically dominate our markets to devastating effect. As Sunity Maharaj points out in a January 17 Sunday Express column titled, Divided and Ruled, “Almost as if it were being passed down by genetic transference, the culture of divide-and-rule remains as alive today as it was in the 17th century.”
Goodbye, Columbus?
The backdrop to Maharaj’s comment was Jamaica’s decision in January 2015 to approve the local merger of the operations of providers Lime and Flow. In so doing, Jamaica became the first country in the region to do so. Two months before, Lime’s parent company Cable & Wireless Communications (CWC) had entered into a deal to acquire Flow’s parent company Columbus International for US$3 billion. The deal, signed at CWC’s London headquarters in November 2014, was approved a month later, in another London-based meeting in which CWC’s shareholders voted overwhelmingly in favour of the acquisition.
“This deal between CWC and Columbus may have been transacted in the UK and US, but the brunt of its impact will be felt by Caribbean stakeholders,” points out Bevil Wooding, an internet strategist with non-profit Packet Clearing House, in a November 6 Business Guardian article.
Understandably, news of the deal sparked widespread concern in the Caribbean because the prospect of reduced competition in the sector was regarded as a precursor to several negative region-wide impacts.
“The first time most regulators in the Caribbean heard of it was when it was announced on the London Stock Exchange,” Wooding pointed out in a December 4 Business Guardian column.
Although no approval was needed from the Eastern Caribbean Telecommunications Authority (ECTEL) on behalf of Dominica, Grenada, St Kitts and Nevis, St Lucia, St Vincent and the Grenadines, the sub-regional regulator moved quickly to caution that consolidation could result in consumers suffering reduced choice of services and service providers.
The Caribbean Telecommunications Union (CTU), a regional intergovernmental body, also hastened to call a special meeting of key stakeholders in Port-of-Spain in December. CTU Secretary General Bernadette Lewis said the meeting would try to forge region-wide consensus around the regulatory issues arising from the deal and advise Caricom heads of government on how to ensure that Caribbean consumers were protected.
Dr Didacus Jules, director general of the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) Commission, threw his weight behind the Port-of-Spain forum.
“There is an inherent danger in governments and national regulators only entertaining bilateral talks with CWC and Columbus executives. The priority of individual governments to protect local national interests must be balanced against the need to simultaneously safeguard regional interests,” he said.
Divided we fall
Yet, as the title of Maharaj’s column suggests, Jamaica’s approval of this deal seemed to amount to a breaking of ranks with its Caricom neighbours. The acquisition still requires regulatory approval in T&T, and Barbados but the decision of Phillip Paulwell, the Jamaican Minister with responsibility for science and technology, has caused real concern.
“Clearly, what has happened in Kingston is that the Jamaican government’s commitment to CWC’s agenda and timeline for this deal has trumped its own commitment to the regional agenda,” Maharaj writes. “What assurances and commitments from C&W would Paulwell have lost if he had held out until a common position had been worked out among Jamaica, Barbados and T&T on this merger?”
Of real concern is the fact that the Jamaican government had only months before joined the rest of Caricom in endorsing the establishment of the Caribbean Single ICT Space. And Paulwell is serving as the president of the CTU, the body charged with spearheading efforts to make the Caribbean Single ICT Space a reality! Where’s a sharp-tongued calypsonian when you need some real-time political commentary?
The CTU went on, regardless, to mark its quarter-century with a five-day 25th anniversary ICT Week held from February 2-6 in Port-of-Spain. And several speakers, including Grenadian Prime Minister Dr Keith Mitchell, the Caricom head of government with the regional portfolio of science and technology, outlined a vision for the development of a Caribbean Single ICT Space.
For his part, Paulwell was reported by the January 16 Jamaica Gleaner to have said, “What I have sought to do is to go beyond the law and to extract certain conditions, which I’m pleased that the company has accepted fulsomely, because I wanted to ensure that we would preserve competition as much as possible and protect the interest of the consumer.”
Paulwell’s words impressed few, least of all Digicel Jamaica boss Barry O’Brien. Speaking at a recent private sector organisation of Jamaica event at Digicel’s downtown Kingston headquarters, O’Brien said: “As we are all aware, the Jamaican government rushed to approve this merger far quicker than any country, despite Jamaica being the market where the greatest monopoly was created.”
Arguably, O’Brien and many others should have seen it coming when Columbus Networks and Cable & Wireless Communications announced, at International Telecoms Week 2013, a joint venture to share an undersea cable network connecting 42 countries and spanning more than 42,000 kilometres.
As Wooding wrote in a May 2013 CircleID post, Joint Venture Promises Broadband Benefits with Potential Risks for Latin American, Caribbean Markets: “The agreement created an entity with control of almost 90 per cent of the region’s subsea cable infrastructure and raised the first red flag to regulators across the region.”
So the question now is: who is going to emerge as a regional calypsonian, a watchdog to safeguard regional, national and public interests by holding elected and appointed officials to account? Hopefully, it will not be too long before the answers emerge.
In the meantime, we’ll just have to extempo on our own.