There is a familiar argument that appears whenever difficult questions are raised about fairness, wages, opportunity, or accountability. It goes something like this: now is not the time. The economy is fragile. Investors are nervous. Stability must come first. Fairness, we are told, can wait.
It is an argument Saint Lucia has heard many times before.
The problem is that fairness has been waiting for a very long time.
In public discourse, growth is often treated as an end in itself, rather than a means. We speak confidently about expansion, resilience, and competitiveness, but far less about who actually benefits when growth occurs — and who absorbs the cost when it does not. Too often, the burden of adjustment falls quietly on workers, small businesses, and ordinary households, while the language of “national interest” smooths over the imbalance.
Stability, of course, matters. No society thrives in chaos. But stability that requires one group to continually sacrifice while another is consistently protected is not stability at all — it is imbalance with good manners.
We have grown accustomed to the idea that fairness must be postponed until conditions are perfect. Yet conditions are never perfect. There is always another reason to delay: a downturn, an election, a global shock, a fiscal constraint. In the meantime, inequities harden, frustration deepens, and trust erodes.
What is striking is not that people are dissatisfied — it is that dissatisfaction is so often explained away rather than confronted. Workers are told to be patient. Citizens are urged to be understanding. Those who raise concerns are warned about being divisive, as though asking for fairness were an act of hostility.
But no society has ever achieved justice by asking its most vulnerable to remain silent for the sake of comfort.
The real question is not whether fairness is affordable, but whether unfairness is sustainable. A country can endure economic difficulty. What it cannot endure indefinitely is the quiet conviction that the system listens selectively, rewards unevenly, and protects itself more diligently than it protects people.
Leadership, at its best, does not merely manage expectations — it interrogates them. It asks whether the sacrifices being demanded are shared equitably. It asks who is being asked to wait, and why it is always the same groups being told to do so.
If fairness is always postponed in the name of stability, then stability becomes an excuse rather than a goal.
And when that happens, the calm surface of public life may remain intact — but underneath it, confidence begins to drain away.
A nation should never have to choose between stability and justice. When it is said that it must, it is worth asking who benefits from the delay.