by Christopher Lowe

There is one, faint though it is, in all this Global Meltdown / confidence shaking/confusion.

The average Bahamian is being affected, and some are asking “why?”

Our lazy stream, meandering through the softest rock, is now faced with turbulence, restriction and stagnation that have caught most completely unawares.

Bahamians are being forced to ask questions about their very existence.

Why can’t the Government help me? Why is gas so expensive? Why are food prices rising?

Why is our government claiming impotence?

Therein lays the silver. We are being forced to think, to question, to reason for ourselves, something we have been able to avoid quite well for decades.

The reasoning is necessary, on an individual basis, because there are different views on why or how we find ourselves in this predicament, and just as many if not more causes.

They are cumulative and long standing.

The situation is also showing how little some people think at all, so the learning curve is extremely sharp for some, but the necessity is now clearly felt, just as severely as the hunger and desperation is being felt. But, without any rational thoughts from any quarter, one will ask, the necessity for what?

Honesty with each other and more importantly with ourselves.

A case in point is the recent budget exercise, in which the Prime Minister claimed a reduction of Duty and an elimination of stamp tax.

Most are clueless that what actually happened, but are now seeing it in their daily expenditures, and are asking why.

Certain foodstuffs were already duty free, but still had a 2% stamp tax. This was what
was eliminated.

Everything else however, got the former stamp tax value lumped in with duty, and further got rounded up 3%.

Some things took a jump, from 10% to 45% or 27% to 45%

Some categories increased 10%

The prime minister even referenced the fact that they projected their revenue to increase by some 10%. This of course has not happened. But the level of taxation on the honest citizen or business has increased.

The government in all this is quite happy to let public opinion, through ignorance fall squarely on the merchants and business houses, a group that the public has been trained to be suspicious of for years. The Merchants have gone quietly about their businesses, not even bothering to defend themselves when attacked or focused on as a group.

I had a lady the other day tell me straight that the average duty rate in the Bahamas was 10%. She must have caught a part of the Prime Ministers address.

Or the other customer that said; “you pay the duty, I don’t pay the duty”

Duty has always been a hidden tax, in that the average Bahamians exposure is at the airport or harbor when returning from Mecca, and has always been negotiable or avoidable. But for the honest business, it is a cost of sales, a calculable cost unavoidable that must, like salaries or utilities, be expended, then recouped. It is a cost of doing business.

Like the Citizen, after cussing and threatening physical harm to the proprietor of a business was told not to return to the store until he learnt some manners said “this is public property, you can’t bar me from here”

Like the average Bahamian who never bothers to learn the laws they live under, preferring to take their chances by allying themselves with civil servants and politicians who “adjust” the laws as needed to either include or exclude people from their personal scope of influence.

We used to be a rules based society, one in which the rules were really never an impediment to our comfort zones, to our way of life. They were standards to be adhered to. We discarded them, along with the representatives of the author, Great Britain.

The rules are still in print, but not observed or enforced anymore and have been replaced by personal power and exaggerated authority, by those who are charged with enforcing the written law. 

It has been far too easy for some to get away with, but it is the public at large who has allowed it, by either finding allegiance with these usurpers, or by remaining silent, or largely by being ignorant of the law.

“People get swing” as they say, but it is only through ignorance that this happens.

We need to familiarize ourselves as individuals with the written law, as it will be our only protection as things get tougher, and as the government gets more desperate to be seen to be providing that which they have promised. The appropriation of private property for instance is not out of the question in the Bahamas, and has been the last act of many governments globally in the face of severe decline. The frustration is growing, demons are being searched for, but the fault will not be laid at the right feet if we live by mysticism and fallacy.

The very same things that we as Bahamians comment on, laugh about, and perhaps practice and then brag about, are the undoing of our country, and will continue to be as long as we continue to do.