Pindling, Anchor Projects & the Bahamian General Election

by Sir Arthur Foulkes

Prime Minister Perry Christie predicted that this election campaign would be dirty and it appears that he knew what he was talking about. Mr. Christie and his colleagues are faced with a long list of issues that defy convincing response.

For the last five years and from the very beginning this administration has stunned the public with one scandal after another and has limped from crisis to crisis. From the Korean boats fiasco right up to the Anna Nicole Smith scandal, Mr. Christie and his colleagues have repeatedly shot themselves in the foot.

Every government faces challenges of one sort or another, but what is important is how the leadership deals with them. Mr. Christie, “as prime minister”, has been anything but forthright and resolute in confronting a long list of crises.

On top of all this Mr. Christie and his colleagues have with great glee pursued their “new model” of development for the country. The centrepiece of that model is the giveaway of thousands of acres of public land to foreigners to develop as residential property for sale to other foreigners.

In the face of extreme public unease over this incredibly shortsighted and misconceived policy, they have not relented. In the waning months of their administration they are considering an increase in the rate of giveaway from thousands of acres to tens of thousands of acres!

Public anxiety is mounting because people understand that a new government can stop the scandals but will find it difficult, if not impossible, legally to recover for the Bahamian people much of the land so recklessly given away.

Since they are unable to dispose of the scandals they have themselves created, and since blaming others is not working, Mr. Christie and his colleagues have resorted to counterattack in an attempt to throw their opponents off balance.

FNM Leader Hubert Ingraham has naturally been the chief target and has been subjected to a relentless assault. There is nothing wrong with that except that some of the abuses and charges hurled at Mr. Ingraham are not based on fact.

A particularly nasty attack is the PLP’s radio advertisement which alleges that Mr. Ingraham “tortured” former Prime Minster the late Sir Lynden Pindling through two commissions of inquiry. The radio ad also seeks to capitalize on sympathy for Sir Lynden who, it alleges, left “with his patriotic heart broken”.

The PLP has been advised before not to use Sir Lynden as a campaign prop. It is better that he be left at rest with the hope that his positive legacy will loom large in history. But, as the old people used to say, “hard-head bird don’t make good soup”.

It is true that the FNM Government under Prime Minister Ingraham instituted two commissions of inquiry, but inasmuch as the results of these were embarrassing to Sir Lynden, he had only himself to blame.

The commission of inquiry that was to devastate Sir Lynden, tarnish his legacy and expose the shame of a nation mired in corruption was appointed at his direction; and Sir Lynden and his Government picked the commissioners.

Mr. Christie and other members of the PLP Government are quite old enough to remember all this, but perhaps they hope to mislead younger Bahamians who have no memory of those awful days.

The trafficking in illegal narcotics had been a problem in The Bahamas for years but by the late 1970s and early 1980s this nefarious business threatened to consume the country like a raging fire.

The so-called Colombian cowboys moved in and with the collaboration of Bahamian and other recruits operated throughout these islands, from Abaco to Inagua. And a vicious lot they were.

One of the biggest drug gangsters in the world, Carlos Lehder, set up headquarters at Norman’s Cay in the Exumas complete with armed guards, jeeps, airstrip, sophisticated communications, guard dogs and helicopters. The Colombians made life difficult for the winter residents who maintained homes on the cay and they left.

The country was awash in drugs and narco-dollars. A new and unprecedented era of violent crime and lawlessness was unleashed on The Bahamas and traditional values were trampled in the dust. Many young Bahamians became victims of drug addiction as some of the cocaine destined for the United States found itself on the local market.

Promising young lives were ruined in an orgy of drug abuse and violence, and the peace and tranquility of the country were destroyed. The after-effects of those days are still very much in evidence today with a kind of criminality that was previously rare in The Bahamas.

More than a few religious leaders were sucked into the maelstrom; but one prominent religious leader in a touching jeremiad cried out for relief and complained that the drug culture was so pervasive that “somebody in authority has to know something about it”.

Somebody knew, of course. Some heroic Bahamian policemen like Avery Ferguson and Lawrence Major were on the frontline being outgunned by the drug traffickers and betrayed by Bahamians in high places, but Sir Lynden’s PLP Government seemed oblivious, even complicit.

The attitude of Sir Lynden was later summed up in an astonishing statement to the effect that “It’s an American problem. Let them clean it up.”

But it was very much a Bahamian problem. It was, in fact, the worst period in the history of the modern The Bahamas and Sir Lynden’s Government did little or nothing to deal with it.

Most Bahamians went on their way as narco-dollars fuelled an increasingly acquisitive and ostentatious consumer culture. But the bodies of dead Bahamians piled up and the number of drug-ruined lives escalated.

Then on September 5, 1983, Brian Ross of the NBC television network blew the lid off the whole sorry mess as he broadcast allegations of drug corruption in The Bahamas implicating the Prime Minister. An enraged Sir Lynden flew to New York to confront his accuser live on television.

The first response of Sir Lynden and his defenders in the PLP is still quite familiar today. It was, they said, all a conspiracy against him and against The Bahamas on the part of the Americans, the Opposition and The Tribune.

But things only got worse as the international press picked up the story. Screaming headlines spoke of a nation for sale and made other uncomplimentary references to The Bahamas. The tragedy is that most of what they had to say was true.

That, very briefly, is the background to Sir Lynden’s decision to accede to opposition demands for a commission of inquiry into drug trafficking through The Bahamas. Sir Lynden and his Government picked the members of the commission.

That commission sat for a year and the whole sordid story was revealed. The commissioners concluded that drug trafficking had adversely affected almost all strata of Bahamian society and that the pervasive corruption reached Cabinet level. Sir Lynden himself struggled to explain large deposits that had been made to his bank account.

Hubert Ingraham had nothing to do with any of this, except that later on it fell to him and an FNM Government to restore the good name of The Bahamas in the world, and to begin the task of national reconstruction.