The an­nounce­ment by Caribbean Air­lines that it has to lay off a quar­ter of its work­force and re­struc­ture it­self to sur­vive should not sur­prise any­one.

Glob­al­ly, the air­line busi­ness is one of the most dif­fi­cult to suc­ceed in be­cause it is based on mar­gins that are hard to achieve. Costs are not of­ten in the con­trol of the air­lines. For ex­am­ple, the price of fu­el, un­less you do a hedge, re­quires the ca­pac­i­ty of scale to re­duce the unit cost but not the or­gan­i­sa­tion­al in­ef­fi­cien­cy that large com­pa­nies are of­ten sad­dled with. It al­so needs a fierce com­mit­ment to cost con­trol, ef­fi­cien­cy, in­no­va­tion, en­tre­pre­neur­ship and a clear strat­e­gy.

Fol­low­ing years of loss­es be­tween 2011 and 2017, in 2018 and 2019, CAL ap­peared to be mak­ing the right moves.

The air­line brought in new man­age­ment, cut routes like the cash-guz­zler Lon­don route and re­duced some of its ex­tras. No longer were you al­lowed two bags in econ­o­my; it even scaled back some of its of­fer­ings in Busi­ness Class. CAL im­proved its on-time per­for­mance while con­tin­u­ing to main­tain its Caribbean feel.

There was some re­brand­ing and its part­ner­ship with Machel Mon­tano en­sured that it re­mained in the hearts of the peo­ple of the Caribbean.

But then came COVID-19 and, like all oth­er air­lines, it faced the chal­lenge of how to nav­i­gate a glob­al health pan­dem­ic.

This week, we learnt it made a loss of $172.5 mil­lion for the first quar­ter 2021 on top of a $738 mil­lion loss re­port­ed for 2020.

So CAL was in trou­ble and there is no doubt that there would be ca­su­al­ties.

What did not help its cause was the Gov­ern­ment’s de­ci­sion to close T&T’s bor­ders for the past 15 months.

Let me be clear, I am not mak­ing the ar­gu­ment that the bor­der clo­sure alone is what has led to this sit­u­a­tion that CAL finds it­self in. Had the bor­ders been opened in a man­aged way, how­ev­er––as every sin­gle Caribbean is­land, with the sole ex­cep­tion be­ing T&T, was able to do––the ex­tent of the dis­lo­ca­tion and pain that CAL faced would have been re­duced.

The bor­der clo­sure and the Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley-led Cab­i­net’s in­sis­tence that there was on­ly one way to pro­tect the pop­u­la­tion from death and de­struc­tion, re­vealed that the Gov­ern­ment is not pre­pared to do any­thing that seems to be in­no­v­a­tive be­cause that would re­quire thought, plan­ning and ex­e­cu­tion of some­thing that we have not al­ready seen play out.

Some months lat­er, the prospect of a $110 mil­lion sev­er­ance pay­out and the an­guish of peo­ple los­ing their jobs is yet an­oth­er ex­am­ple of both the un­ex­pect­ed con­se­quences of the pan­dem­ic and the fail­ure of the Gov­ern­ment to come up with the in­no­v­a­tive so­lu­tions this cur­rent sit­u­a­tion is forc­ing not on­ly CAL but oth­er busi­ness­es and en­tire coun­tries to find.

Less there are those who are still of the view that the Gov­ern­ment had no choice and that we could have lost thou­sands more cit­i­zens, per­haps we could look at our Caribbean neigh­bours and we would see that T&T did not per­form bet­ter than any of those coun­tries. Not even Haiti.

Bar­ba­dos has had up to Tues­day, 4,045 cas­es with 47 deaths. If you con­sid­er that Bar­ba­dos has one-fifth of the T&T pop­u­la­tion and you mul­ti­ply the cas­es and deaths to match with T&T’s pop­u­la­tion, you would see we have done worse than our Caribbean neigh­bour, which chose to keep its bor­ders opened most of the time dur­ing the pan­dem­ic.

Let’s look at the num­bers for Ja­maica. Twice the size of T&T and about twice the size of pop­u­la­tion and an­oth­er Caribbean coun­try to keep its bor­ders opened, Ja­maica has had 49,735 cas­es and 1,037 deaths.

T&T, with bor­ders shut, cit­i­zens state­less and of­ten beg­ging to come back home, had 30,982 with 761 deaths. Clos­ing the bor­ders did not make us safer. All it did is to show the rest of the re­gion that the ad­min­is­tra­tion did not have the con­fi­dence that we could op­er­ate a man­aged bor­der with the req­ui­site pro­to­cols. We had nei­ther the in­no­va­tion nor self-be­lief.

This sit­u­a­tion must wor­ry us deeply be­cause we know, in­stinc­tive­ly even, that to emerge from this pan­dem­ic, to build this econ­o­my to last and to find new sus­tain­able rev­enue streams, we need three things.

1. We need a coun­try unit­ed around the cause to trans­form the econ­o­my.

2. We need a gov­ern­ment that is com­mit­ted to re­duc­ing its stran­gle­hold on the econ­o­my, sup­port­ive of the pri­vate sec­tor, pre­pared to live with­in its means, will­ing to do the hard work of pen­sion and so­cial se­cu­ri­ty re­form and leave no stone un­turned to in­crease ef­fi­cien­cy and com­pet­i­tive­ness.

3. We al­so need a pri­vate sec­tor that is com­mit­ted to in­no­va­tion, that does not see its role as buy­ing and sell­ing for prof­it and which can car­ry our econ­o­my in a new ap­proach to de­vel­op­ment.

The in­abil­i­ty over a 15-month pe­ri­od to find a so­lu­tion to the bor­der is­sue, even when cit­i­zens, peo­ple with T&T pass­ports, were be­ing told to stay in place, is un­con­scionable on the one hand and does not bode well for our abil­i­ty to in­no­vate.

We have heard the Fi­nance Min­is­ter make the ar­gu­ment that it’s bet­ter to bor­row at dou­ble the in­ter­est rates from the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment than from the IMF be­cause it may de­mand the coun­try do what it has to do the en­sure mon­ey is well spent. We have heard the Min­is­ter of Fi­nance con­tin­ue to in­sist that it is fine to use the Her­itage and Sta­bil­i­sa­tion Fund to pay salaries and yet he can­not see how it’s a con­tra­dic­tion that while CAL has to send home work­ers be­cause it does not have the mon­ey to keep them em­ployed, it’s okay for the Gov­ern­ment to bor­row mon­ey to pay salaries?

We have to take ac­tion to save our mi­cro, small and medi­um en­ter­pris­es, as they are the busi­ness­es that em­ploy most of the peo­ple in the coun­try.

We must piv­ot from what we have done in the last 10 years if we are to sur­vive.