NEWS
Republic Move Comes Under Fire Some members of the academic community have frowned on the exclusion of ordinary Barbadians in the process that led to Barbados’s transition from a constitutional monarchy to a republic on 30 November 2021.
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irector of the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies (SALISES) Professor Don Marshall described the transition as soulless, while President of the Barbados Economic Society (BES) and Assistant Lecturer in the Department of Economics Dr. Simon Naitram said the failure to hold a referendum was extremely ironic and unfortunate given that the process was supposed to be about making the country more democratic. The two spoke at a virtual town hall meeting held on 14 October 2021 entitled “Constitutional Reform and the Republic: Symbolism, Substance, and Implication” that was jointly hosted by the Faculty of Law and the Faculty of Social Sciences.
Professor Don Marshall
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CHILL NEWS
The other panellists were Caribbean Policy Analyst and Assistant Lecturer in the Department of Economics, Dr. Dalano DaSouza; Senior Lecturer in Political Science in the Department of Government, Sociology, Social Work and Psychology, Dr. Tennyson Joseph; and President of the Law Society, Mr. Pierre Cooke. Professor Marshall said during the process of decolonisation, the matrices of social and economic power should ultimately be dismantled, thereby giving rise to new patterns of wealth creation and economic classes. However, he said specific, social, elite classes and racial groups continue to dominate Barbados and intergenerational wealth continues to elude Black Barbadians. “We have run our economy on the basis of FIRE, which has to do with finance, insurance, import trading, and real estate. The commercial and merchant capital juggernaut in Barbados remains the same; that is why we have a soulless republican transition. Deep in the bone marrow of the Black majority in Barbados, we have not yet made the transition to see the rise of a new economic class of entrepreneurs Dr. Simon Naitram seized by the fact they can pursue new
