Bahama Pundit

Politics & Disorder

by Andrew Allen

At breakfast and lunchtime on any given weekday, the long-term parking lot at Nassau international Airport becomes a hive of business activity, as groups of entrepreneurial ladies set up tables and umbrellas and unload an assortment of delicacies from their vans and station wagons.

Long lines of patrons, which seem to include a solid majority of airport workers and managers, as well as curious tourists, attest to the generally high quality of the foods on offer.

Inside the adjacent domestic terminal, an outsize, generally empty ‘café’, with shabby décor and mediocre service does a comparatively meager business. In fact, given the costs associated with its ‘concessionary’ lease, it is a wonder that the poor establishment has managed to remain in operation at all in the face of the competition from the parking lot.

It is fair to assume that those who originally conceived the design and management of the airport did not anticipate that the concessionary tenants, whether vendors of drink, food or perfumes, would have to contend with unlicensed, unregulated competitors who could just pitch camp and operate rent-free and hassle-free from the parking lot.

Like so much else in The Bahamas, the original plan for the airport would have been designed after a model conceived elsewhere. And in the places where Bahamian government planners would have seen and wondered at the model (North America, England etc.) it actually works. An informal vendor at Heathrow or O’Hare would last little longer than a man with a rucksack in an Osama bin Laden outfit.

The Effie Knowles Saga

by Larry Smith

This is a story about unusual Bahamian connections...a tale that begins in the 18th century and still spins today. A story about Indians, lawyers and land sharks...and a glimpse of the life of one little-known woman of Bahamian descent who made good in the United States, but left open a pandora's box of island intrigue.

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Florida lawyer Effie Knowles is something of a celebrity in Bahamian real estate and legal circles these days, although she has been dead for 20 years and few people have ever heard of her.

Her parents were Bahamian emigres. She was born in Key West in 1892 and died in Miami in 1984 at the ripe old age of 92. Her grandfather – James Alexander Knowles was born on Long Island in 1839 and moved to Key West. Florida did not become a US territory until 1821 and for a long time Bahamians looked on the Keys as northern Out Islands.

At the height of the Depression, the 1930 census puts Effie living with her widowed mother (Julia), two sisters (Laura and Beatrice) and a brother (William) in Miami. All five were described as white and literate, and Effie - a lawyer - owned the house. All are now dead.

But their legacy lives on - a legacy that stretches back to the earliest land grants in the Bahamas. In fact, Effie’s claim to more than 12,000 acres on several Bahamian islands has generated enormous controversy lately, with some describing transactions involving this estate as “the biggest land fraud in our history”.

On the Taste of Sand

by Nicolette Bethel

The ostrich is a lovely bird. Big. Flightless. Beautifully feathered (as we should know, as many of their feathers adorn Junkanoo costumes). Fast.

And much maligned.

Ostriches, according to legend, ignore danger by burying their heads in the sand. (The fact that they do not do this in actuality is neither here nor there; what matters today is that people think they do.) So, according to legend, instead of running or fighting when they're threatened, they simply stick their heads underground and wait for the problem to go away.

The ostrich, not the flamingo, should be our national bird.

I'm not talking about the size of ostrich eggs, or the fact that an ostrich can outrun even Tonique Williams-Darling (they can apparently clock up to 31 mph in speed), or even the fact that an ostrich could be turned into a great Junkanoo costume. I'm talking about the head-burying thing.

On PetroCaribe & Poverty

by Larry Smith

“The (days of relatively inexpensive energy) are behind us and we’re now dealing with a very different environment...We all need to be more thoughtful in how we use energy.”
--US Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman

While State Finance Minister James Smith argues for alternative fuels and greater efficiency to tackle rising energy costs, Vincent Coleby, chairman of a government advisory panel, wants to make petroleum cheaper for Bahamians.

But according to Minister Smith, cutting gasoline taxes is “off the table”. And cutting retail and wholesale margins will simply postpone hard choices that the country has to make.

Mr Coleby’s Petroleum Usage Review Committee was appointed in June to look at margins, transport costs, royalties and rentals in the local fuel industry.

At a College of The Bahamas panel discussion last week, Mr Coleby said we could get lower prices by subscribing to Petrocaribe - a regional political and trade pact proposed by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

On Merit

by Nicolette Bethel

Connections, they say, are everything in The Bahamas. They tell you who you are, where you stand in society, what you can do, how high you can climb. The person with connections is rich indeed. The person without --

Well, let's say they better have a Green Card.

There are many people who believe that a society built on connections is a corrupt society, one in which social ties lead to success. When who you know is more important to your positioning than what you know and how well you know it, a society cannot grow, cannot change. It's a sad truth, these people claim, but it's a truth anyway. The society built on connections is one that's bound to fail.

The PM & Opposition Politics

by Sir Arthur Foulkes

The governing party and its allies are obviously enjoying the goings-on in the opposition in the run-up to the FNM’s convention in November. In the House of Assembly last week PLP members, including Prime Minister Perry Christie, took aim at the way the FNM’s leadership contest is developing.

That is what opposing political parties do, and in this particular case the process has not been a text-book example of what should happen. But political activity is seldom by the letter and that is why each major political event has an anatomy of its own.

While attempting to score points, Mr. Christie and his colleagues should bear in mind that the Bahamian electorate is more sophisticated, exposed and informed than ever before.

The idea that a political party can or should at all costs avoid internal debates and contests is simply foolish and can never lead to progress, only atrophy. A political party must demonstrate that it is willing to take the risks associated with democratic process.

On Sin and the Refugee

by Nicolette Bethel

Okay, I admit it. The two, sin and refugees, don’t normally go together. At least, not officially. Sin is sin, and refugees are, well, they’re just unlucky.

But last month's events along the Gulf Coast of the United States, and the social fallout that has followed, seem to suggest something different. There's a subtle battle of terminology that's been going on under the surface, in the background, upstage, behind the main action played out by FEMA and the President and the Mayor and the Governor, and it's this: nobody's all that sure what exactly to call the people who have been displaced by Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent floods.

Some people want to call them "evacuees". Some people want to call them "victims". Some people want to call them "survivors". Some people want to call them "displaced". What is pretty clear, though, is that many people — most prominent among them prominent African-Americans — are resisting calling them refugees.

Jesse Jackson's one of those who think that "refugee" isn't the right word. Al Sharpton's another. Both believe that to apply the word "refugee" to the New Orleans evacuees is racist. Both justify their positions by making reference to the fact that the victims of Katrina who have been pushed from their homes are citizens of the United States of America. The very obvious implication: Americans are Americans, and not refugees.

ZNS & Opposition Politics

by Andrew Allen

Given their likely ramifications, it is understandable that the events within the FNM governing council were on everyone’s lips for most of last week.

Everyone, that is, with the exception of the good people at ZNS, whose keen-eyed newsmen seemed to remain blissfully unaware that anything newsworthy had taken place in the official opposition at all.

When one tries to imagine the public broadcasters of Britain, Jamaica or Barbados failing to give coverage to such an important event within the opposition party, the scale and context of the failure becomes clear and, frankly, embarrassing.

The difference, of course, lies in what Carlton Smith, the corporation’s Deputy General Manager, admitted only a few weeks ago: that our national broadcaster, despite 12 years of competition, is so compromised by political associations that it “cannot work in the public interest” in terms of giving fair and objective news coverage to Bahamians.

On What Government's Supposed to Do

by Nicolette Bethel

I spent most of the end of August watching the coverage of what happened in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. I'm sure I wasn't alone. It was a hard story to watch, but compelling. For people in Abaco and Grand Bahama, the devastation was frighteningly familiar; for those of us in Nassau, it's instructive. Because there but for the grace of God go we.

The biggest problem, as I see it, wasn't the geography of New Orleans, or the intensity of the hurricane. Both of these are facts. They're facts with which the city of New Orleans, the state of Louisiana, and the federal government of the USA have lived forever. History has shown all of them what floods and storms can do to the city, and studies predicted just this eventuality. For people to claim that what happened in New Orleans was beyond their imagination is inexcusable; what happened was not only imagined, but predicted.

The problem lay with the failure of government at every level it existed.

A Petrocaribe Backgrounder for the Bahamas

by Larry Smith

On Thursday, a panel at the College of the Bahamas will discuss policy options for the Bahamas in the face of rising energy costs.

Participants will be independent MP Pierre Dupuch, ex-Shell Bahamas manager Vincent Coleby, hotel association chief Earl Bethel, Marlon Johnson of the Small Business Association, and Rupert Pinder, a business lecturer at the college.

It was just over a year ago that Tough Call presented the first balanced review of Venezuela’s proposed oil deal for the region, known as Petrocaribe. Until then, all we had to listen to were political rantings about high gasoline prices.

One of our main points a year ago was the glaring lack of information, combined with the fact that the government had no thought-out energy policy: “If Trade & industry Minister Leslie Miller is so sure of himself, why doesn't he enlighten us on the details of his so-called 'energy policy' before embarking on such far-reaching negotiations?” we wrote at the time.

Clearly, the reason we were kept in the dark is because the minister himself didn’t have a clue how the scheme would work, and didn’t care so long as it gave him an effective political soapbox. In fact, it was only recently that wiser heads in the government forced the appointment of an advisory body to research the whole issue of fuel costs.