NASSAU, Bahamas, CMC—Prime Minister of Barbados Mia Mottley is calling for the Caribbean banking sector to be infused with greater diversity and competition and to ensure that constraints to economic growth are confronted directly.
Speaking on Friday, the closing day of the 31st Afreximbank Annual Meeting and the Third AfriCaribbean Trade and Investment Forum, she said competition is necessary to respond to de-risking banks in the region.
“We have been less than dynamic in the banking sector to our citizens in this region,” she said, adding that someone can open a bank account in Canada in 10 minutes.
“… because of the pressure put on Caribbean countries with the loss and threat of the loss of correspondent banking, it takes two to three months even if you are an individual heading up organizations, and for which the risk is seemingly much less,” Mottley said, calling the situation “unacceptable.”
“Our people cannot be financial lepers,” the 58-year-old prime minister said and told the meeting that when she was 16 years old, she walked into the Royal Bank of Canada and opened an account.
“Nobody asked me anything about a utility bill. Nobody asked me a whole host of questions. And while I understand the need for due diligence, I know that it can be done far better with competition and that we can treat ourselves far better.”
The banking issue was one of three that Mottley raised during her brief intervention on the closing day of the annual meetings. The meetings are being held in the Caribbean for the first time, one year after the continental bank opened a regional office in Barbados.
Mottley said Afreximbank has become the bridge across the Atlantic, and it has made itself very, very well known not to governments but to ordinary people because it has chosen to have a presence in the Caribbean.
“We keep looking north for investment, but we need to look within and across,” Mottle said, speaking one day after Barbadian businessman Mark Maloney signed a deal to borrow US$100 million from Afreximbank for the construction of a hotel in Barbados and expansion of his cement business.
Mottley said she believes Africa and the Caribbean can find the appropriate instruments to mobilize capital and their people’s savings.
“… and if we can find a way that makes it easy to understand the possibilities for those investments, I believe that we can do far more to help ourselves, even before we ask others to help us.”
She said that, against this background, reforming the global financial architecture is still critical.
“… but we do believe that when you have excess liquidity in our banking systems, as many of us have, and when we are exposed to the extreme conditions that the climate crisis presents, then we need to ensure that we do not put all of our eggs in one basket.”
For some time, the Prime Minister of Barbados has said that gross national income, rather than gross domestic product, should determine a country’s access to developmental financing.
She said that intra-regional investments will provide tremendous opportunities for green transformation.
“We have a date with destiny, particularly in countries on the front line of the climate crisis. Because we have a decade or so to adapt and build the resilience we need.”
Mottley pointed out that Barbados will take over in Ghana next month the chairmanship of the Climate Vulnerable Forum (V20 Forum), which groups 68 countries globally, many from Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific, as climate-vulnerable countries.
“Vulnerability and insurance are two issues we must confront,” Mottley said. “Because if our country’s, our sectors, and regions become uninsurable, then by definition, they become uninvestable, which compounds our situation.
“But worse than that, the financial system that we have come to know is premised on insurance, whether for access to mortgages or access to loans for small, medium-sized, or large enterprises.”
Mottley’s third point is related to investment opportunities. She added that she had mentioned in Bridgetown two years earlier that the notion of dividing tourism in the Caribbean between “summer” and “winter” seasons “is a curious designation for me because I’m yet to see snowfall in the Caribbean.”
She said that tourism must be an all-year-round pursuit if the Caribbean is reclaiming its destiny and charting its future.
“But if you are only focusing on North Atlantic countries, then you will hear about winter and summer because the North Atlantic countries go to Europe and the Mediterranean in the summer,” Mottley said.
“And yet, those of us who are here don’t see snow,” she further stated, adding, “But the absence of that transport link has meant that we don’t sufficiently develop the tourism markets for this region.
“It is an unbelievable state of affairs,” Mottley said, adding that Africa and the Caribbean have a unique opportunity based on their knowledge of the people in both regions.
“We like to eat well. We like our music. We like our art. We like to dance. We like to enjoy life. We like, equally, to sit back and reflect and gaff and talk with each other,” Mottley said.
She said this is “an amazing opportunity in cruise tourism that remains untapped; not to be shaped and directed by others, but to be shaped and directed by ourselves.”
The prime minister said Africa and the Gulf states have the lowest penetration in global cruise tourism — 3% each.
“In our Caribbean region, we have cruise ships visiting virtually daily during the winter, and in the summer, it is as spotty as it can be the further south you go in the Caribbean.”
Mottley believes that the time has come for investors in the Caribbean and Africa to work together to initially pursue the leasing of a cruise ship “and focus directly on what our people like to do.
“Because I believe that it will become tremendously successful, but it should be done first and foremost by us for us, and that may mean leasing initially until we can own the vessels ourselves,” Mottley said.
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