WHY COME BACK: The Irrelevance of Geography

After half a life of caring for everyone but herself, an exhausted wife may well contemplate running away from home.

A mid-life businessman – mortgage paid, kids finished school, some money saved – might think of relocating to a future rich with guiltless possibilities.  But for the children of the Diaspora, where to live is a question of an entirely different colour.

If there’s a family business, a plot of debt-free land, or some promised post waiting, a few will eagerly return.  But many young undergrads – in Canada, England or America– foresee at best, a doubtful future and feel a dwindling sense of national obligation.

After their time in a world of higher incomes and stronger growth, they view their new degree as a tradable asset entitling them to immediate returns; it is the first step to higher earnings and a fast track to the mainstream of professional advancement.

By comparison, home seems a stagnant backwater, a tangle of pot-luck politics and vengeful personalities. Return implies building a future from scratch in an economy with no discernible direction.  Better to stay abroad: learn, work, save, grow.

In London, Toronto or New York, new paths and old pitfalls are fairly clear: there is a perceptible order to society.  Granted, it can be tough going but at least daily life is not frustrated by arbitrary ignorance.

Out there, the enemy is known, and it is not some ministry official messing with your life, just because he can.  Whatever happens, you do not labour under the illusion that you deserve a break in your own country.

Then there is that student loan: larger than a house, slower than a car.  It will devour half the paltry salary that the average graduate can expect in the Caribbean.  If they return, their best risk-taking years are spent paying off a mountain of old debt.  Soon there will be a vehicle loan and the inevitable mortgage.  By then, it is too late to transition from bill-payer to investor. All that state of the art expertise, lost to kin and country.

So the decision to return or stay is hardly rocket science – not with economic growth dwindling, investment approaching zero, and employment under siege back home.  The future resembles that place where the returnee can reasonably expect to prosper on individual merit, in a system that cares little about who he is, or where he started, or how he voted in the last election.

Photo courtesy tehillaradio.com

Of course, there is still love of country: that need to be rooted to a few square miles of planet earth.  All very nice, but that won’t pay the bills.  Besides, these grads know how elusive higher education can be. They remember what their parents lived through.

Even for retirees, who need good health care, personal security and a sense of order, back-home no longer seems the ideal place to retire. The tug of patrimony has given way to practical considerations about their quality of life.

The emotional tug does not work on their offspring either; those second and third generations, full of first-world knowledge and technology.  All they feel – if they visit – is acute disappointment that so little has changed since their parents migrated to a ‘better life’. To them, basic systems of governance remain inexplicably archaic and obtuse: their metropole has moved along while ours has slipped back.

Ask the average Caribbean minister about renewables, emerging technologies, new economic space, alternative agriculture, global trends in education, digital media, social entrepreneurship… or how to energize a shrinking private sector. It’s not stupidity; it’s just that the systems have not evolved and now require radical re-engineering.

Simply put: the Caribbean’s economic base is not adequately prepared for the future. Most economies are languishing because their economic fundamentals are sagging and the old ways are painfully obsolete.  At this stage, cosmetic surgery simply will not do.

What the region needs is more like a triple bypass operation to remove the detritus of decades of complacency.  Unless this happens soon, not even the region’s own moribund citizenry will take their countries seriously.  And that lack of faith – now manifesting as a haemorrhage of brain power – will be the fatal stoke.

Already, there are signs of a muted frenzy bubbling to the surface of everyday existence: that dark energy which turns people on each other at the first scent of blood.  It makes a bus full of travellers curse a policeman for sanctioning their reckless driver.  It makes a young man stab his best friend over some electronic trinket.  It makes a politician kill a project offering a hundred jobs, because the idea came from someone on the other side.  It makes the ministry official messing with your life, chronically unavailable to answer phone calls.  It makes governments impotent, unable to satisfy even the basic aspirations of ordinary citizens.

So if young graduates don’t turn for home, don’t be surprised.  They too feel the need to jump free of the failing system.  Unable to point to a single thing that works convincingly well, they make the only rational choice available.

As economic circumstances level out across the global marketplace, quality of life issues – not geography – will increasingly decide where progressive businesses locate. They too need security, education, health care, infrastructure, quality services and good governance.  Where the Caribbean ranks in that scheme of things will also determine whether or not our own army of tech-savvy, knowledge-laden, new-age entrepreneurs ever return to our shores.

Both the Caribbean and its people need to become magnets for home-grown talent as well as foreign capital.  To do that, the region needs something that no amount of foreign aid can ever buy: more open and enlightened government.  That is the one thing the people must manufacture for themselves.

Our Caribbean deserves more open and enlightened government.  If our current crop of leaders have any sense at all, they would chart that course, rev up the economic engine, and get the hell out of the way.