Gya: It's all in the mind

Barbados is bitching, whining, and moaning about Caricom nationals, especially Guyanese, entering in search of work. According to Rickey Singh, Bajans are carrying on as though Barbados is the promised land for Caribbean nationals, the one place in Caricom that offers free education, yadda yadda. If Singh is accurately depicting what Bajans are saying, then they have an over-inflated sense of their own importance and need to be reminded that Barbados offers its citizenry nothing that is not part of life in other Caricom nations.

Here's what Singh says Bajans need to be reminded of:

Truth is that among CARICOM countries, it could be Antigua and Barbuda that has, in terms of resident population, the single largest percentage of non-nationals from within the Community, approximately 28 per cent of its estimated 73,000 population.

And the new government of Prime Minister Baldwin Spencer is currently drafting legislation to facilitate qualified non-nationals living there prior to 2000, to become citizens, many of them from the Eastern Caribbean and also Jamaica and Guyana.

Across in Trinidad and Tobago, a so-called `little Grenada’ has long been very much part of the cosmopolitan mix of the diverse peoples of that twin-island, as that Grenadian-born cultural asset of the Caribbean, `Mighty Sparrow’, would remind anyone interested.

Read the rest of the article and hope that Barbados gets over itself.