Guest Editorial

Originally published as a column for the Freeport News and the Nassau Guardian, Saturday, June 30, 2007.

Reprinted here with the kind permission of Mr. Brown.

Had she won her seat in Pinewood, Allyson Maynard-Gibson would have been perfectly positioned to possibly accomplish her burning ambition to become the first female Prime Minister of the Bahamas. With the Progressive Liberal Party now in Opposition and a growing consensus that former Prime Minister Perry Christie should step down as leader of the PLP, as a member of the House of Assembly Gibson would have had an excellent chance of becoming the first female leader of the PLP.

Her main opposition would have come from Obie Wilchcombe, Member of Parliament for West End and Bimini, and Dr. Bernard Nottage, MP for Bain and Grants Town, but at the very least she would have been a very serious contender for the leadership.

The likelihood of that happening has been made more difficult by Byran Woodside, who pulled off what many consider to be one of the major upsets in the May 2 general election when he defeated Gibson. Indeed, Gibson was so shocked by her surprising defeat that she reportedly insisted on the ballots being recounted several times before officials finally convinced her that no matter how many times they engaged in a recount, the figures would not change. Still unwilling to accept rejection by the voters of Pinewood, she is one of the three defeated PLPs who are challenging the results of the election in their constituencies in Election Court.

Meanwhile, her appointment as Opposition Leader in the Senate has provided her with a platform to campaign for the position of Leader of the Opposition if Mr. Christie decides to close the book on his active political career or delegates to the PLP’s next convention decide that they no longer want him as leader.

Gibson clearly was auditioning for the job in earnest during the budget debate in the Senate, no doubt hoping that supporters of the PLP who viewed the live coverage of the debate on ZNS television would take note of her feisty contribution and her subsequent management of the opposition challenges to the various heads of the budget during the committee stage.

But in the process of trying to sell herself as a possibly good candidate for Leader of the Opposition, Gibson made some totally ridiculous statements that surely raised doubts about her suitability to be the leader of this great country that has come so far in bridging the racial divide, but still has a good distance to go to reach the ultimate goal of truthfully adopting Jamaica’s motto: “Out of many, one people.”

In her contribution to the budget debate last Friday, Gibson, not so subtly, played the race card almost at the outset of her address. My journalistic mentor, Sir Arthur Foulkes, addressed this issue quite eloquently in his column in The Tribune on Tuesday, June 26, which was in the form of an open letter to Gibson.

After giving Gibson a brief history of the Dissident Eight, who left the PLP in 1970 because of serious concerns about the direction the party was headed under the late Sir Lynden Pindling’s leadership, Sir Arthur had this to say:

“I know that you know all these things, Mrs. Gibson, and that you have heard them repeatedly recalled. Yet on the floor of the Senate last Friday, you likened us – the roots of the FNM – to the slave master who tortured to death a slave girl, poor black Kate, in the 19th century. Then you went on to say that we were opposed to majority rule and independence. By what perverted mental processes could you come to compare us with murderous slave masters? …”

Gibson is old enough to remember the struggle that led to majority rule and who the principal players in that struggle were. If her memory fails her, she only need to consult with her father, Sir Clement Maynard, who was one of the giants in that struggle.

Had she asked Sir Clement for his input before she got up on the floor of the Senate and made a total fool of herself, she would have been told that among the Dissident Eight were several of the key individuals who were responsible for Sir Lynden solidifying his power in the PLP.

Sir Clement would have told her that Arthur Foulkes, Warren Levarity, Jeffrey Thompson, Eugene Newry, Roosevelt Godet, the late Simeon Bowe, the late Bazel Nichols along with himself were among those who formed the nucleus of the National Committee for Positive Action (NCPA), an action group within the PLP in the early 1960s that was primarily responsible for Sir Lynden emerging as the “supreme leader” of the party.

Were they alive today, I am sure that the then chairman of the party, the late Sir Henry Milton Taylor, and the then secretary general, the late Cyril Stevenson, would attest to the fact that it was indeed the NCPA which engineered their removal from the two top positions in the party during a meeting held upstairs Sr. Agnes schoolroom, off Market Street, either in 1961 or 1962.

And it was a known fact that members of the NCPA were staunch advocates of independence for The Bahamas way back then. So was Arthur D. Hanna. But it is also a known fact that Sir Lynden at that time was opposed to any suggestion of The Bahamas becoming independent and really never embraced the proposition until well after majority rule was ushered in by the PLP’s historic election victory on January 10, 1967.

Gibson, of course, should know all this, but I suspect that she conveniently had a lapse in memory because she did not want the facts to contradict her made-up version of the struggle for majority rule. But her obvious attempt to distort history rubbed me the wrong way because of her mean-spirited assault on the heroic members of the Dissident Eight, who had the courage to challenge an all-powerful leader that some of them had helped to create.

Readers of this column know of my love and admiration for Sir Arthur, who along with Sir Etienne Dupuch, the late editor and publisher of The Tribune, were primarily responsible for my early training as a journalist after I went to work at The Tribune in May of 1960.

I have noted in this column on more than one occasion that there is no politician involved in the progressive struggle who made a greater contribution than Sir Arthur. Consider this fact: In 1962, when being associated with the PLP was not as fashionable as it became after the PLP won the government in 1967, Foulkes was one of the PLP candidates for the Far East District, which included most of the Fox Hill area. When his candidacy was announced, he was still the city editor at The Tribune and making a very decent salary. He and his wife Naomi had seven or eight children at the time, and it must have been patently obvious to him that by running as a candidate in the Far East, his job at The Tribune would be in jeopardy, no so much because he was running on the PLP’s ticket, but rather because of who he was running against.

Foulkes’ PLP running mate in the Far East was Arthur Hanna, and the UBP candidates were Geoffrey Johnstone and Pierre Dupuch, the son of his boss, Sir Etienne. It clearly takes a special brand of courage and dedication for a young man with seven or eight children to put his job on the line for a cause in which he believed. No other person in the PLP at the time, including Lynden Oscar Pindling, came close to making such a sacrifice. What’s more, there were certain persons who outrightly declined to run because they did not want to jeopardize their jobs.

When the election results were tallied, Hanna was the leading votegetter, followed by Johnston, Foulkes and Dupuch. Under the voting system that existed at the time, the two top votegetters were elected to the House as the senior and junior members for that constituency.

Shortly after, Foulkes left The Tribune and started Bahamian Times, which anyone who knows anything about the history of the PLP will readily admit contributed in no small measure to the PLP’s victory in 1967.

Allyson Maynard Gibson knows all of this, and she does serious injury to her credibility as a politician by pretending that she does not.

Oswald T. Brown is editor and general manager of The Freeport News. You can contact him via e-mail by clicking here.