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.

But this is The Bahamas in 2005. The attitudes of those with legitimate concessions inside the terminal sums up very well the difficulties of doing in The Bahamas what would, elsewhere, be the very simple matter of escorting the trespassers from the premises. When prompted, the shop owners all resign themselves to the acceptance of an all-pervasive truth of Bahamian life: the insuperable power of politics and patronage in the public service.

While there was undoubtedly political patronage at work in the granting of the original concessions at the Airport, today’s politicians (with no concessions left to hand out) are content simply to obstruct, through inaction, the operation of those rules which inconvenience favoured constituents. Their patronage is thus more often negative than positive in its operation, making it harder to detect, but no less real.

One airport worker summed it up best of all. “Can you imagine any minister” he asked “being seen to stop poor people from feeding their families, especially if these people are PLP’s and have plenty family in the minister’s constituency?” Your columnist was stumped.

The net result of all this is a public whose expectations both permit and encourage politicians to continue promoting disorder through the selective, politically determined enforcement of rules. This, in turn, produces an environment where nobody even questions the presence of airport managers on a line in the parking lot buying conch snacks from illicit vendors.

Most troubling of all, the patronage tendency (which, after all, exists among politicians everywhere) has spilled over into the culture of the Bahamian public service itself, preventing civil servants from acting as good managers even where they are ostensibly freed from the shackles of direct political control.

Since 1999, NIA has been administered autonomously by the Aiports Authority, a body whose inspiration is clear from the use of peculiarly British grammar in its name. But unlike its British model, our authority is clearly unable to administer an airport without the classic mixture of inertia, politics and indecision that undermines government departments. Just as in the days of direct ministerial control, the ‘autonomous’ authority is incapable of organizing something as simple as the removal of illicit vendors from the parking lot of the main terminal.

Certainly, given the rationale for their plans to privatize the management of NIA, nobody in the present government would dispute this analysis in theory. Rather, we are told that this government gives particular priority to contracting a Canadian management company to fix what it acknowledges to be the failures of the Authority. These failures, ministers acknowledge, amount to a blot on visitor impressions of the country.

But nobody any longer questions what this says about the state of our public service. If they did, they would be forced to ask why a Canadian company, with its origins in that country’s own public service, must be called in to salvage a situation that the Airports Authority was specifically created to deal with.

Privatisation, as we all know, can be a valuable tool in delivering efficiency in the management of public enterprises. But this should not be read to mean that public management must necessarily be so bad, so incompetent and so disorderly that even autonomous authorities cannot be left to run public enterprises with a basic semblance of order and competence.

It sometimes seems that the privatization option has given rise in The Bahamas to what economists call a “moral hazard”, where an actor, aware of some insurance or indemnity against a negative outcome (in this case, public sector mismanagement), becomes less concerned to avoid it.

Those in authority must never, through resignation, inertia or laziness, let the notion take root among themselves that if you want something to work in The Bahamas, then you must sell it to foreigners. Otherwise the whole country is doomed to more and more of the same.

Comments

[Rick]

Hello Andrew:
I see you are now as disillusioned as the rest of us with the wonder of government failure. It is nothing new and not only prevalent in our beloved Bahamas.
The wonder of it all is displayed in many more "authorities," ministries and departments here as well.
I think it comes from trying to do too much.
Do you agree now?

[andrew allen]

Actually, Rick, I always did agree with the views of those, like yourself, who deplore the mess of a public service we have in The Bahamas.

Where we may disagree is in the conclusions we draw as to what it means and what to do about it. I say, let's fix not only the public service, but the whole culture that sustains it.

While I also realise that free market solutions sometimes work to counter particular problems of delivery, I do not think that the market model is either morally or ideologically sacrosanct. As a social model, I frankly think it is horrible.

Incidentally, I also believe in positive discrimination in favour of Bahamians when we do privatize. This is an example of a larger right that I recognize: the right of any society to determine what social outcomes it desires and to pursue them through political control of market forces. I simply think we have the wrong politics doing the controlling.