Earth as mother, Gov't as father

Published: 25 Jan 2010
Prakash Persad

Before tribes and political parties, way before nations and governments, the earth existed. From time immemorial man has been sustained and nourished by the earth. Its lands have provided us with food, its rivers with water and its atmosphere with the breath of life. From it we have obtained materials for our homes and cities, our energy needs and our factories. It has sustained us as any good mother would do for her children and we have grown to depend on her. The concept of earth as mother is one that exists in many agrarian societies and continues in the present. The tradition of living off the land is ingrained in the psyche of rural man. Most men, if not all, were rural beings before the advent of the Industrial Revolution and the growth of cities and today’s mega metropolises. Earth has endowed humanity with the belief that we can feed our families by our own hard labour and sacrifice. Mother Earth birthed a culture of self-belief and self-sufficiency as a way of life. This belief has been a major catalytic stimulus in the mass emigrations to the “new world” as free men (eg Europeans to the Americas and the colonies) or as indentured labourers to prop up colonial plantations.

logoIn Trinidad, upon the completion of the indentureship sentence, the vast majority of the original and subsequent generations settled within and around the plantations. In many, if not most, instances, agriculture became the first port of call as the preferred mechanism for subsistence living or supplementary income while still being tied to the plantations; living in the country and of the country but, for all practical purposes, aloof from the civic, private and state institutions and processes. Earth as mother made these folks individually hardy but nationally foolhardy for the unbiased and accurate records would indicate that they received and continue to receive, on a per capita basis, a substantially lower level of state disbursements and support than their urban/proximate urban counterparts. The abolishment of the evil scourge of slavery naturally resulted in a movement of the newly-free away from the plantations and towards the urban establishments. The preferred approach was to either enter the public sector workforce or go into businesses and fully engage in the processes of the State and governance. Urban populations and their proximate population densities are naturally denser than rural ones. This factor coupled with the paradigm of seeking employment as opposed to self-employment meant and continues to result in a greater economic vulnerability of these populations, because of their dependence on the economic fortunes of the country and business. Their ability to disrupt business and affairs of the government was strong, not only because of geography but also because of their dominance of unions representing the workers in the public sector. Of course, political affiliation meant that their demands had to be catered to expeditiously. These factors gave birth to the culture of government as father, resulting in a disproportionate portion of the resources being allocated to urban and proximate urban populations. There can be no argument that governments, in times of distress, must provide social safety nets and some intervention in the employment markets. But equity dictates that a more balanced approach needs to be adopted and implemented. The urge to engage in too much social engineering also needs to be strongly resisted. As the country becomes more urbanised, the adherents and ethos of earth as mother are fast disappearing. Trinidad is inexorably moving towards the status of a city state (by way of illustration, the city of New Delhi is approximately the size of T&T) and hence all citizens, irrespective of their geographical location, justifiably expect equal access to and an equitable share of the national patrimony. Thus the old paradigm of unequal disbursement that emanated from the government-as-father policy is now even more untenable and unjust. The diminishing of the impact of earth-as-mother syndrome has come about as a natural byproduct of industrialisation and urbanisation and the continuous decline of the traditional agricultural sector. The attitudinal belief in government as father has to be diminished through a sustained, coherent and meaningful programme of education and training. Non-equity would be a bitter tea for the nation to ingest. n Prakash Persad is the director of Swaha Inc Source: http://guardian.co.tt/news/columnist/2010/01/25/earth-mother-govt-father