Reviewing National Reconciliation

National Reconciliation in SVG is more than we think. We assume that personal leadership initiatives and gestures that speak peace might kick off this process, and that a Ministry and Minister of Reconciliation can lead the attack.{{more}}

Not so. It strikes me that a Vincentian national reconciliation calls for a profound struggle, even a reinvention of our Vincentianness. The struggle for reconciliation is not really for reconciliation; it goes deeper than that and must excavate and redesign those legal, social and economic forces that tear apart our community. Our political leaders, past and present, have been effective instruments and tools, willingly and unwillingly used to manufacture weakness, to reproduce poverty and to conform SVG to unreal standards bearing the name of democracy. Any serious national reconciliation in SVG must express our collective disgust with and departure from the political economic instruments that we use to govern and groom our Vincentian (and other regional) community.

We can get a sense of what reconciliation portends when we note in Christian scripture, reconciliation is quite costly to God; further, it is a general Christian pursuit, or ministry (2 Cor. 5:11-18), and it is the entry point of renewal of a new creation. From that point of view, reconciliation is a people’s/citizen’s ministry, costly and painful, but it unfolds unforeseen realities. Yes, it means more than the ending of tribal animosities, discriminations and national disintegration. It is the birth breach for the hidden future.

A few weeks ago, Parnel Campbell Q.C, in his lecture on “Governance, the people’s role”, provided a telling and thoughtful critique of political tribalism, especially from a FORUM document of 1972. At that lecture Jamaican professor Errol Miller, an education and politics reform activist, purposed that political reform should have a direct and directing civil society and people’s throughput. The event was a valuable introduction and contribution to national reconciliation discourse. Let us take it further beyond political critique to political economic propositions.

RETHINKING NATIONAL RECONCILIATION

• Action by those “above” do not bring about national reconstruction unless these instruments of division change their notes, break away and repent

• A suffering and hoping or cheering people and civil society will not be instruments of national reconciliation in SVG. Only a proactive and conscious community

• An accepted and unredeemed political arrangement which makes the state apparatus to be owned by a cracked up tribal elite, which plays lethal war games against the other elite cannot be expected to bring about reconciliation. That political system must be overthrown and replaced by an inclusive nation uniting state systems and leaderships

• We cannot be reconciled to one another when our first attachment is to foreign investors and provided from the North Atlantic, Japan, the BRIC and the ALBA. We have to appreciate first our highest qualities and capacities here in SVG.

With national reconciliation, our SVG becomes a community which is richer in resources, both in quantity and quality, because animosities and tribal and other exclusions are removed. That is just the knock on the door, really. Because this is what we will discover when we join in this struggle:

• Our SVG is an undivided, unexplored Mountain and Marina of existing resource combinations that begs for a governing state to include and accumulate all our interests.

• Our SVG will reinvent “Vincy” to mean all those who rise up with the future in their eyes and with voices strong with resolve for change. New Vincy

• Right now here is not a moment too soon to take history into our hands. Let us invite unity in our neighborhood, let us shatter the walls of division and discrimination, and abolish the tribes – ULP/NDP. Let us accuse and charge ourselves with too much tolerance with evil. Time to move consciously.