Time To Make Sport Central To The National Economy
This country’s general elections are scheduled to take place tomorrow, Thursday, 27 November 2025. The Vincentian electorate will, once again, elect a government to manage the affairs of our country for the next five years.
For those who have gotten involved in understanding sport, know that this is one of the fastest growing industries in global economies. One has only to examine the kind of salaries to which sportspeople now have access, as compared to the past, when amateurism was offered as the only option and when those who controlled societies insisted on it being a mere pastime.
A brief analysis of the history of sport in St Vincent and the Grenadines leaves one sadly disappointed. Reference is repeatedly made to some outstanding individual athletes without addressing the pathetic lack of understanding of the value of sport to nation-building and certainly, nothing in respect of locating sport as an important pillar of the national economy.
One government after another, occasionally made reference to sport without engaging qualified sports personnel to aid in the development of an approach to sport as a vehicle for personal, community and national development.
We are yet to establish a ministry whose portfolio deals with sport alone. This is reflective of our failure to rise out of our slumber.
Successive politicians who have been allocated the sporting portfolio have been such products of history that they have fostered very weak sporting institutions characterised by a lack of planning and appropriately trained and qualified personnel who are engaged in the business of integrating sport in the national development process.
Governments across the English-speaking Caribbean are notorious for the cosmetic construction of sport facilities without the engagement of national sports associations and their competent personnel. They construct facilities, occasionally, more to give the impression of doing something as opposed to being part of a broader national holistic development plan that looks beyond the next general elections.
We must recall that this country only made physical education and sport a part of the curriculum of secondary and tertiary education after the Caribbean Examinations Council made it an examinable subject. Even then, we started, not at the preschool and elementary school levels. We begin physical education and sport as a subject at the secondary school. It was and still is one of the few subjects where our children’s educational development does not allow them any precedent before entry into the secondary school system and after three years of it, students are expected to determine whether or not they wish it to be one of their elective subjects for the CXC examinations.
For the most part, physical education and sport are still perceived as just another subject to allow students to make up the number of subjects they have passed but with which they can garner no employment.
It appears to have escaped successive governments and their appointed ministers of sport, that since the Kerry Packer cricket experiment, cricketers have access to an ever-increasing range of salaries.
Whereas not so long ago we had our cricketers complaining that the administrators of the sport in the Caribbean were asking them to play too much cricket in a single year, we now have difficulty keeping up with the number of financially lucrative competitions in which they engage themselves in any particular year. Many of our cricketers have become wealthy through the sport they have mastered.
Our heads of government have been sitting at CARICOM and lamented the declining fortunes of the West Indies cricket team and the best solution that have conceptualised in the establishment of a Heads of Government Committee on Cricket, displaying their own lack of understanding of sport and the importance of locating it as central to the broader regional development ethos and the master plan for economic sustainability. Instead, fraught with problems related to unifying the region and the elucidation of a development plan to which all are fully committed, the heads of government languish in adhocracy and an unwillingness to take their heads out of the sand.
A new approach
Vincentians have an excellent opportunity to go beyond the nonsensical practice of rashly spending money on sport facilities that are not part of a long-term strategy aimed as allowing sport to fit appropriately in the national development plan.
In the previous two Columns in this newspaper, we have attempted to show that in St Vincent and the Grenadines there has been no genuine commitment to sport beyond the desire to win the votes of the young people of the country.
We call for an end to the political myopia of our government.
New vision
One is probably unable to identify any clearly enunciated vision to sport over the past several decades. It must be an embarrassment that when one examines what has been marketed as national development options sport does not make it to the list of national priorities.
Decades of promoting the National Lotteries Authority (NLA)as being for sport and culture and we have been unable to get any annual report on how much money generated by the institution has been allocated to either of the two areas in any given year. There has been little public accountability in this regard. Vincentians sportspeople do not have any knowledge of the funds generated and details of their usage. They are asked to be satisfied that the government of the day is doing its best.
The time has come for a new vision. This vision must emerge from critical analysis of what is happening in and through sport around the world and how we can adapt, become fully integrated in and contribute to the changes that are taking place and positively impacting nations.
The new vision must emerge from a genuine consultative process involving persons with the expertise and not the self-styles power brokers more intent with embellishing their own and their respective constituency images more than that of the nation.
Our country must have been seen as ‘out of wack’ to expend scarce financial resources to fete the ‘cricket legends’ after the regional governing body for the sport, Cricket West Indies (CWI), more appropriately publicly acknowledged, recognised and feted them from their own coffers. Our decision could only have been perceived as political grandstanding in the face of the CWI’s president entry into electoral politics here at home. That could only have been a display of petty politics at its worst.
National Sport Structure
We need to identify sport as one of the more important pillars of national development.
With the number of careers in sport on a sustainable growth path, we ought to be encouraging our students to broaden their perception of their future and how that is linked to the well-being of St Vincent and the Grenadines.
The time has come for us to bring together our qualified sport personnel to build a national sports structure that at once aligns sport with the other major pillars of the national economy and carefully construct sport development and sport for development pathways that provide career opportunities for future generations as we ought to be doing in other fields of national endeavour.
Time must be taken to revisit the uncoordinated and seemingly incoherent, system that is in place.
The broader national sport structure must take into consideration how the competitive school sports are aligned with the national goals. Parents, principals, teachers and students must be guided by a clearly defined system where physical activity and sport and seamlessly integrated into the holistic development of our Vincentian people.
Financing Sport
A new system that is transparent and supported by accountability must be put in place in sport in St Vincent and the Grenadines.
Sport has to be financed by a new partnership between the government, the private sector and the national sport associations with clearly established guidelines consistent with national developmental priorities.
There has to be clear guidelines regarding the pursuit of sport scholarships, areas of study, reporting systems and commitment to St Vincent and the Grenadines similar to what is done in respect to scholarships in academic areas.
We must encourage students to pursue studies in the growing field of sport career options so that we can do more research and developmental work at home and be less reliant on others from outside.
Sport for National and Caribbean Development
The European Union has shown the world what is possible when a group of nations deliberately choose to work together in their individual and collective interests. The member countries of the European Union are perhaps all possessive of better developed economies that is the case of our CARICOM. Their example, however contentious at times, reflect an understanding that the benefits of collaboration and cooperation far outweigh the narrow, selfish and greedy pursuit of individual development.
There is every reason for our small Caribbean nations to review and re-think our strategic interdependence. This is critical to ouyr survival. If nothing else, sport and our successes at the international competitive sporting level, have thought us that we have the capacity to be more and better, when we do it together.
We continue to ‘shoot ourselves in the foot’ when we behave like ‘crabs in a barrel’ showing an embarrassing preference for selfishness and the building of individual political egos while our nations perish.
Let us commit to doing better for the future of our Caribbean, starting with sport, learning from our experiences on and off the field of play and shaping a better, brighter future.
Be sure to vote
It is the inalienable right if all Vincentians to vote. Do not be taken in by those who choose not to exercise that right.
Voting is just part of the process of participation in the decision-making process of a nation. Regardless of the outcome of elections, the right to participate remains. Do not be silenced.
Seize every opportunity to positively impact the broader national development process and do so fearlessly, always committed to pursuing the highest ideals of nation-building. This is an opportune moment for all to make sport central to the national economy of St Vincent and the Grenadines.
#SVG #SportEconomy #NationalDevelopment #SVGElections #CaribbeanSport #VincyFuture #SportPolicy #EconomicDiversification
