Keisha drags herself out of bed at 4.30 am because water is finally running in the taps. She must get some washing done and fill the buckets before it suddenly takes its leave again.
She hollers to her partner, Rhaj, “When we getting that tank again, you know my mom has one, right.”
Rhaj is leaving home at 6.10 am because he has to get to work for 8.00 am, which is only 20 minutes away, but the bus cannot be relied upon and the traffic can.
He says “Keisha girl, we need a tank and a little car like the one Moses just got.”
Keisha says, “If we get the little car, we can drop the kids to some private lessons after school because that government school not really working out”
Rhaj replies, “You mean we need to get them into one of them private schools.”
At half past eight Keisha and her friend Lasonta join a line to apply for passports for their daughters, they tried to be early, but the line is already spilling outside the office. Two hours later they are still in line. The clerk is doing her best inside a process designed for control in the post-emancipation era where administration was itself a system of passes, registrations and documentary hurdles for controlling formerly enslaved people.
Lasonta says, “Keisha we will be here whole day unless we see someone we know”.
That evening the electricity goes, Keisha calculates how long the goods in the fridge will last and hollers to Rhaj, “Boy we really need we own generator like Lasonta.”
This is the endurance economy.
Nothing in that day is unique to Rhaj, Keisha and Lasonta or to that day. It happens to thousands of people across our beautiful and beloved Caribbean every single day. Nothing in that or the other days is a disaster and that is the point. None of these daily inconveniences will make the local newspapers. No minister will call an emergency meeting, no national statistic will record the hours lost, or the sheer irritation of everyday life. It is just part of the normal pattern of the inconveniences that define everyday life in the endurance economy.
In the article, “No One Is Coming to Save Us,” I wrote that we have built economies our people endure rather than choose and in this series I want to define and dissect the endurance economy and propose simple solutions.
Rhaj, Keisha, Lasonta and our brothers and sisters across our beautiful and beloved Caribbean are participants in and victims of an institutional structure I call an endurance economy. The queue to apply for a passport. The fact that when you apply for a new government document, they require another document generated by the same government. The vehicle sitting in a yard for four months while a replacement part travels from Asia.
I disagree with those who argue that the endurance economy is a cultural phenomenon and the notion that “Caribbean people are just that way.”
This lazy and easy explanation is an excuse for unacceptable levels of institutional failure. The same Caribbean people accused of indifference at the University of the West Indies, passport office or water authority deliver world class service at hotels, call centres, accounting firms or export businesses. What changes in these entities is not the nationality of the people but the institutional structures around them, the expectations, supervision, incentives and critically, the customer’s ability to walk away.
If we look under the hood of the endurance economy, we will find some mechanisms that run the machine and have made it unusually durable in the Caribbean setting.
Lloyd Best argued that the plantation economy was organised around the needs of an external enterprise, while the domestic economy received what remained. The plantation economy leads to the endurance economy as the locals are after thoughts, appearing at the end of the process, served after the institution has protected its procedures, hierarchy, revenue and convenience.
The endurance economy persists because its costs are invisible, a series of private insults and suffering rather than a public catastrophe. A Category 4 hurricane demands action, a hospital roof collapsing can force a commission of inquiry, but the series of daily nuisances that define the endurance economy produce a series of sighs or even blame assigned to the victim. The endurance economy is death by a thousand cuts.
The American journalist Annie Lowrey has a name for the hours her fellow citizens lose to forms, queues and repeat visits. She calls it the time tax, a levy nobody voted for, which appears in no budget and is collected from citizens trying to obtain what is already theirs. Keisha and Lasonta paid the time tax in the passport line and Rhaj pays it every morning at 6.10 for a twenty-minute journey.
Both are collected on top of the official taxes. Both fall hardest on the people least able to pay them, because the well-connected and the well-off can buy their way out, and neither ever appear when the Minister of Finance rises to present the budget. The endurance Account I propose below is a ledger for both.
Those in the wider society best placed to demand accountability and reform are often the ones resourceful enough to purchase an exit. Rhaj and Keisha buy a tank and stop noticing the water outages. Keisha’s mom installs a generator and stops calling the electricity company while Keisha and Lasonta send their kids to the private school and stop complaining about the government school. None of these choices are morally wrong. The families are protecting themselves, but every private escape removes a strong voice from the constituency needed to advocate for public repair.
We must dismantle the Endurance Economy by making its invisible burden visible.
In the spirit of my colleague Prof. Troy Lorde who calls for filling Caricom’s missing infrastructure, I propose an endurance account, a short annual report with a series of public dashboards. The endurance account will measure and publish the costs of coping in the endurance economy. The dashboards can report the hours spent in queues and repeat visits, hours of water and electricity interruption, household spending on backup systems and private substitutes and the time between a routine application, claim or repair request and completion.
Can we legislate a statutory duty on agencies to publish their own time tax annually?
Once we know the productive time citizens lost accessing a range of public and private services, or the share of household income spent on private substitutes we can possibly change the political conversation. By making queues more than anecdotes, and power or water outages more than private inconveniences, coping will no longer be mistaken for prosperity and citizens will demand action.
No one is coming to count this cost for us. The first step in dismantling the endurance economy is to place the costs on the national ledger and stop sweeping them under the carpet as a series of private irritations. In part 2 of the series, we take a deeper look at customer service in the endurance economy.
