Whatever predictions and projections we might have as a nation for the year that begins today, these cannot fail to take account of the formidable imponderables with which we are confronted. There is no crystal ball here. Insofar as, in different times, there are at least some sound safe assumptions upon which we might rest our predictions, those are well and truly non-existent at the start of this year.
The novel coronavirus has seen to that. In more ways than one 2021 has found us not confidently projecting our thoughts towards exalted goals but going forward, gingerly, one foot in front of the other, hoping as we advance.
Just where we are headed, in a general sense, insofar as our longer-term development as a country is concerned is far from clear. The principal challenge here reposes in those imponderables that have to do with the persistence of the novel coronavirus. As humans we have grown accustomed to intermittent disruptions to the way we live. These, are almost invariably compartmentalized and confined within time frames. This is not the case with the prevailing pandemic. It has stood the logic of the past on its head. It means, whether we like it or not, that our predictions and projections for the year ahead must focus, first, on seeing off the pandemic.
Here, one speaks of considerations that include shoring up our health system, raising our safety and health barriers, buttressing our education system as best we can and protecting our economy from further erosion, particularly those aspects thereof that are concerned with job-creation and retention and food security.
Where food security is concerned there are those imponderables that do not allow us to be able to predict, with a reasonable measure of certainty, just what the situation will be, down the road. We are not in a bad way in the world insofar as food security is concerned though our agricultural sector, for example, still remains, to a considerable extent, reliant on some level of specialized tools and other inputs that are not readily at our disposal. Here, it is not just our large-scale agricultural pursuits with their implications for export earnings that are important but those small and subsistence level farming pursuits that have long played critical roles as income subsidies for families of modest means and have actually put food on the table directly.
We have already determined that since COVID-19-related economic disfigurements could well continue to result in further job losses in the period ahead (there is no reason for us to assume that in this regard it will not get worse before it gets better) that people’s ability to resort to options that repose in enhanced levels of self-reliance are likely to make a difference between survival and otherwise, depending on just how much longer we have to live with the coronavirus.
What all this amounts to is the need for us to seek to create a system of governance that takes account of not just the circumstances that now obtain, but the imponderables that lie ahead; in other words, the governance agenda, going forward, cannot remain locked into a business-as-usual mold but must begin to move in a direction of greater flexibility, greater innovativeness, even assuming, in some respects a survival mindset. This is not to say that, going forward, we must exclude, altogether, the kind of long-term planning that countries need to have; it means, however, that the immediate need is to focus more attention on just how we will get through the period that lies immediately ahead of us.
This will give rise to the need for the rearranging of priorities to ensure that our short to medium term, survival-related goals are moved further forward, even assuming that these are already on the front burner. Even if long term development remains the ultimate goal we cannot focus all of our energies and resources there whilst ignoring those shorter term building blocks that will see us into next week. Here, one speaks of the need to make serious adjustments to aspects of our systems of governance that cause us to look more closely at those fundamental requisites for seeing us through the period that lies immediately ahead, with all of its imponderables.
A few things come to mind immediately. If we are to strengthen our health care systems, for example, we are going to have to look beyond the coastland, to our interior regions where health care facilities remain sub-standard.
We are also going to have to funnel such resources as we can afford to help extract our education system from the condition of crisis. Education falls into that ‘going forward’ zone which we ignore at our own peril.
Staving off the kind of abject poverty in pockets of our country that could easily materialize out of the circumstances confronting us is also going to have to be a priority. That would mean, as far as possible, focusing on job-creation, opportunities for poor families with no alternative means of support to be able to earn. The role of our agricultural sector can hardly be overestimated here. Setting aside its importance in realizing export earnings, farming can play an invaluable role in significantly raising the level of self-sufficiency at the individual and family levels that will reduce the need for direct state subsidies. Going forward, agriculture can play a significant role as a survival mechanism in circumstances where other avenues may no longer be open.
We have, recently, made repeated cases for affording small businesses a seat at the national decision-making table. Historically, policy-makers appear to have been unable to make up their minds as to just what constitutes small businesses and how these fit into the wider economic matrix. The reality is that unless proper studies are done to provide authentic information into just what constitutes the small business sector and the various ways in which small businesses add value to the country’s economy, to employment levels, particularly, we are going to be (from the standpoint of the overall development of our country) on a hiding to nowhere.
Our sternest challenges are probably likely to arise at the governance level, possessed as it is with seemingly immovable anomalies that have their roots in dimensions of political divisiveness and one-upmanship. What we discover repeatedly, even though we are loathe to admit it, is that the sheer weight of prejudice and divisiveness that afflicts our country pushes even the noblest of motives beneath the surface. It is, all too frequently, the divisions that inevitably rise to the surface. Perhaps worse, what our leaders refuse to accept is that unity in this context cannot be contrived. We have passed that way too many times before. Nor can the problem of an absence of collective endeavour be disguised through contrivances that pay lip service to an overarching national interest.
All of these circumstances dictate that 2021 cannot be characterized by the kind of wishful thinking that so often manifests itself in New Year’s greetings. We need to begin the year not just with a keen sense of the circumstances in which we find ourselves but in an environment in which decision makers across the board must resist bringing to the table high-sounding platitudes hidden behind the same deep-seated prejudices. A collective sense of the need to see ourselves through these times as a nation must come from within. The theatre has become untenable.
