by Edward Hutcheson

It should be apparent by now that those who we have elected are more interested in foreign investors than they are in Bahamians or the Bahamas. Bahamians are being threatened by elected officials and those who were not elected because they beg to differ on particular points of opinion that have their beginning with some investor or someone who allegedly is giving or has given money to someone who is elected or not elected. Precious natural resources are being damaged by indiscriminate development in many areas we once regarded as pristine. Why should the Minister of Tourism go to Las Vegas to sell the Bahamas? We do not really sell what they sell. Or, has Las Vegas become the convenient  template for how our leaders are defining our Tourist product? Haven’t we learned anything yet? The way that the dynamics in Grand Bahama messed up everything for the first Prime Minister of this Nation. Placed him and his party on a path that was is direct opposition to what was promised in the Constitution of a new nation? And, those monstrosities they construct in Las Vegas are built on wastelands. We do not have any wasteland. We do not have any land to waste. Is this something we are going to spell out to these “suits” who lead us? Our product is about people, not things.

When we look at  the behaviour of our politicians, one would think that there has been an amendment that has extended the rules of privilege  beyond the walls of Parliament and into the public domain.But, this is our problem. We have not been good stewards of what we have been blessed with. We are just coming into a revelation that took us all of 46 years to uncover; the players may have changed but the play is still the same. Our present difficulty is that the players look like us and every time they have had a conflict they would bring up Stafford Sands, the UBP,  someone in Abaco, East Bay Street, West Bay Street or Lyford Cay. Ironically most of them reside in one of these locations.  I am thankful that some of us are realizing that, a particular card is not playing anymore; but there is still a person or two out there who were  protégés of Sir Stafford, who have not gotten the message yet.

The Progressive Liberal Party has to show by example that it is more concerned about Bahamians than it is about foreign investors. A cursory glance over the last budget bears this out, this short-sightedness; not on line about local business development. The amount of noise in the media has given the general population a not too pleasant view of where the interests of our elected representatives lie and the realization that they are more interested in persons with money  is painfully apparent. There will probably be a response to this letter where they will bring up things like the “Training Agency” or getting back BTC, but those responses will be irrelevant  because they will accomplish nothing for the Bahamian people. The training agency is nothing but a circus act where an attempt is being made to change behaviour, an attempt to get Bahamians to behave on the job. We know how to behave it is the training that we need, make that the “preparation for training” that we need. About this time Ms.Marcel has gotten her wake-up call regarding what is in the pool of talent she has to work with; and I do not have to be there to tell her that she has an up hill battle on her hands. And, dropping the City and Guilds name into the equation does not help her because I do not think that behaviour modification is one of the components they offer – I could not find it on their website.

The Prime Minister is in the process of backing out of the getting back BTC parade. What most of us do not know is that the British government has had a representative at these talks; a representative whose concern is for the British subjects who have money invested in BTC/CWS, and these “subjects” will look to their government for protection; something that we seem to be short on.

Any other result than what was spelled out in the agreement will bring about a lawsuit and I do not think the government wants to go to court with a bunch of British lawyers. We are all witnesses to what can happen to an entity when agreements are broken. See Freeport. I also thought that April 2014 would have been crunch time, but I was informed as the Union members should be that there will be a “process” for new companies that want to come into the market and that process will take a year or two, probably taking us up to the next election.  However, I see this as a good thing for the Union and its members because I know that Bahamians can compete; especially on their home soil.

They have about three years to raise the bar and set it so high that any company that comes in will have to be at such a level that communications product in the Bahamas becomes the yardstick in this region. If we are serious, the progress of BTC can greatly affected by Bahamians buying into BTC when the shares become available to the Public, it should not take long to reach the 2% threshold and then BTC will really be answerable to the people and not the government.

We have to see the play for what it is. Elected persons and those who are not elected, are continuing their attempts to prolong a status quo that has been detrimental to the progress of this country. The “all for me baby” crowd has to get off the track or be run off it, and become “equal” participants. Most of them have enough already to take them into the sunset; but being the humans that they are they will always want more and the tragedy for those of us in the public domain is that we are unaware that they often cross political lines to do the mess they do. Because, they are a part of a particular “status quo” who see all of us or most of us as being stupid.

A former Prime Minister said it best when he called out another former Prime Minister with the charge that, “You think your Ma is the only woman who born a child with sense, hey!”. That must be our refrain as we attempt to extend a privilege to ourselves that demands that those who are elected give us more respect than the strangers who come into this country.

July 30, 2013