Bahama Pundit

Questions Raised About Exuma Road Deaths & the Algernon Cargill Controversy

by Larry Smith

Angry questions are being raised about the tragic deaths of two Canadian retirees in a recent traffic accident on Exuma.

In a letter to Police Commissioner Ellison Greenslade this week, Bahamas Humane Society President Kim Aranha has asked whether charges will ever be filed against the hit and run driver.

Ron and Jill Gandza, both in their 50s, from St. Catharines, Ontario, were killed at about 10pm on April 25 while walking home from the Peace & Plenty Hotel. A car driven by a 26-year-old Exumian slammed into them - hurling Mrs Gandza 10 feet off the road and striking her husband with such force that his head smashed the car windshield.

The driver then fled, leaving Mr Gandza lying dead in the middle of the road and his wife critically injured in the bush. A passerby arrived on the scene shortly afterwards and contacted the clinic.
 
According to former Ministry of Tourism official Cordell Thompson, who lives in Rolleville and knows the passerby who tried to help, "the accident occurred about a three-minute walk from the clinic, yet it took over 40 minutes for them to receive attention. The emergency phone number here is never answered. This is a tale of horrors."

Jill Gandza later died of her injuries. She was a retired nurse at Niagara Health System. Ron Gandza worked for General Motors in St Catherine's. They had been visiting the Bahamas for years and recently bought a small retirement home in Georgetown.

Meanwhile, the driver of the hit and run vehicle received minor injuries and was later treated at the clinic. He was initially picked up for questioning by the police, but in the days after the accident he was seen attending the Georgetown regatta.

Seven Major Blunders of the PLP Since May 7

by Simon

It is good to give thanks.  Thus did the PLP brass gather in church Sunday past to celebrate the first anniversary of its election to office last May.  Verily, the PLP might have also invoked the patron saints of lost and hopeless causes given the abysmal record of its first 100 and now 365 days and counting.

Addressing a less than overflowing crowd at the service, Prime Minister Perry Christie struggled to offer any significant accomplishments even as he sought to lift the mood of various disconsolate and frustrated party members.  While church is a place of hope, many have lost hope in Christie.   

If a day can be a lifetime in politics, what a seeming lifetime it has felt like for scores of Bahamians over the past year given the PLP’s charter of unfulfilled hope and broken promises.  And, oh the blunders.  

A national survey to gauge the public’s views of the party’s major blunders since 7 May would likely produce seven times seven.  Though not exhaustive, the seven outlined here showcase a pattern of blunder and a prime minister hardly in command of his freewheeling and chaotic administration.

Immigration Policy and Political Propaganda in the Bahamas

by Larry Smith

The recent controversy over Immigration policy is clear evidence of the inability of Bahamian governments to rationally tackle the core issues that hold our economy back.

As Franklyn Wilson noted, the country's overall approach to immigration was settled as far back as the early 1970s, and yet we can still waste time over it today. The issue was put to rest by the implementation of a strict Bahamianisation policy by the new PLP government, accompanied by a massive investment in education. 

These two policy shifts reversed a trend towards the wholesale recruitment of expatriates, and broadened educational opportunities for Bahamians who could then expand the nation's middle class.

As the late Dr Keva Bethel described the period immediately following the Second World War: "The highest forms of employment to which the majority of Bahamians were likely to be able to aspire...were posts in the civil service, teaching, nursing, or the church. Moreover, only a proportionately modest number actually achieved those positions."

But in the first years after majority rule in 1967, the government spent as much as 19 per cent of the annual budget on education, building new schools throughout the country to provide better education for all Bahamian children.

The Once and Future Community of Great Harbour Cay in the Berry Islands

by Larry Smith

GREAT HARBOUR CAY, the Berry Islands -- "I call it the knowing. I know what's going to happen," 58-year-old Craig Wells confided to me from beneath a raggedy straw hat at the dilapidated beach bar here, just across from the airport terminal. 

"I knew someone was coming to meet me today because I saw the spider last night."

Craig is the son of one of the first real estate salesmen brought to the island by Great Harbour Cay developer Lou Chesler in the halcyon years of this once spectacular resort community. He arrived at the age of 16 with his father, a Long Islander who passed away in the 1980s - at about the same time that the development failed. But Craig never left.

When he is not spearfishing, or playing petanque at the beach bar, Craig whittles away the time at Harold Christie's original 1960s beach house, an appropriately rustic shack set in a grove of tall casuarinas that are spectacularly adorned with the flotsam and jetsam of years of eclectic beach combing.

It was arch realtor Christie who introduced Chesler to the Berry Islands after the Canadian entrepeneur fell out with Freeport founder Wallace Groves. In 1960 Chesler was a successful land developer brought in by Groves to spearhead resort activities on Grand Bahama. 

But according to architect Peter Barratt, Freeport's retired town planner, Groves and Chesler didn't get on, and in the mid-1960s Chesler received a $17 million payout and began searching for other opportunities.

"I remember him storming out of a meeting with Groves late one Saturday morning after they had a falling out," Barratt told me. "Chesler made a packet in Freeport and with the spare cash decided to invest it back in the islands."

Meanwhile, Christie had been busily acquiring property ever since the 1930s, becoming the most successful land promoter in the country. In fact, he was at least partly responsible for almost every major development that took place in the Bahamas until his death in 1973 on a European promotional tour.

The Berry Islands had been sparsely settled by freed slaves after 1835. Great Harbour Cay is the most northerly and the largest of these cays, and Christie had acquired most of it by the time Chesler was looking for something to do with his money.

Aside from the tiny Bullock's Harbour settlement there was nothing on the seven-mile-long island when Chesler bought it, except an airstrip that Christie had built to fly in prospects. Chesler master-planned the entire resort community - golf course, clubhouse, airport, marina, beach and sailing club, villas, home lots, roads and utilities.

After Christie & Ingraham

by Simon

The extensive commentary on the legacy of former UK Prime Minister Baroness Margaret Thatcher highlights the nature of political leadership.

It is especially worthwhile to consider Lady Thatcher’s triumphs and failures in the context of the transition of political leadership in The Bahamas.  A decade out from the 50th anniversary of independence, the country is likely to have as the next prime minister an individual from a new generation of leaders.

The transition may prove more far-reaching than who leads the PLP and the FNM.  The shift may include how the two major parties re-imagine themselves to attract not only newer voters, but also a majority of the popular vote, which neither party secured respectively in 2012 and 2007.   

Many voters remain ambivalent about the political parties, an ambivalence manifested at the polls last May.  

Despite yeoman efforts in the midst of a severe economic downturn, voters handed Ingraham and the FNM electoral defeat.  Christie and the PLP were re-elected, but did not get a majority of popular vote, while Branville McCartney’s DNA attracted disaffected and protest votes, costing the FNM a number of seats.

Lighthouse Point and the History of South Eleuthera

by Larry Smith

ROCK SOUND, Eleuthera -- Other than sun, sand and sea, South Eleuthera's attractions are modest - a landlocked ocean hole where you can feed the snappers, an 87-year-old fig tree spreading along the highway, and an historic Methodist manse.

The Methodist Mission House dates back two centuries, and has been meticulously restored as a museum and community centre. A foundation, led by Chandra Sands (daughter of the late Rock Sound entrepeneur Albert Sands), raised over half a million dollars to support the project.

The Mission has seen a lot of history in its time. Among the items featured in its museum are obsolete medical equipment. That's because in 1942 the building became a community clinic, courtesy of American industrialist Arthur Vining Davis.

According to Albert Sands, in a 2002 speech, Eleuthera survived on small-scale farming and fishing before 1939 "when Arthur Vining Davis stepped onto the scene, introduced to the island by Sir Harold Christie. He bought all the land there was, and our forefathers went to work for him."