Bahama Pundit

Commonwealth Broadcasting Association Conference in Nassau

by Larry Smith

"One of the first things to go in a coup - right after the presidential palace - is the radio and TV station - so we know broadcasting has power." -- Stephen King, director of BBC World Service Trust, speaking at the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association meeting in Nassau last week.

Seventeen years ago, in the midst of a tanking economy, a group of home-grown Muslim jihadis blew up the police headquarters in Trinidad, took over parliament and held the prime minister and many others hostage.

The second thing they did was take over the state-run television station - to announce that the government had been overthrown.

A six-day stand-off ensued with the army, accompanied by widespread looting and chaos in the capital. The prime minister and his attorney general were both shot and wounded by their captors, and dozens of others were killed during the coup attempt.

Trinidad and Tobago is a plural society. The main ethnic groups are Hindu East Indians and Christian Africans, with a small minority of Muslim Asians, but the group that mounted the 1990 coup was mostly black. It's leader was a former policeman named Lennox Philips who had converted to Islam.

This bit of recent history shows that we don't need to look far to see how our own parliamentary democracy might be threatened someday. Our formerly homogenous society is now developing a significant and exploited creole minority, not to mention a hardened criminal underclass.

Secret Ballot and Election Fever in the Bahamas

by Craig Butler

I commented recently that the voting process in the Bahamas is not secret. That comment was picked up by the Nassau Guardian, which precipitated a call from ZNS asking for further comment. I am also led to believe that my comment was alluded to in the Election Court.

First of all I would like to say to Senior Justice Allen and Justice Isaacs (the presiding judges of the Election Court) that I never in any way meant to impugn their integrity. Nothing could be further from the truth. The genesis of my comment was based on the voting process itself.

All of us who have voted in an election know what I am talking about. When you walk into a polling station someone takes your voter's card and calls out your name. Your voter’s card has a number attached to it.

Then you are giving a ballot, which for some reason has a counterfoil that is individualized with a number. At this point I can’t say exactly what happens, but there is a way of recording either your name or number next to the ballot number. And that is why I say the system is compromised and the ballot is not secret. If that were not so, then how could those 110 voters from Pinewood that had their ballots discarded by the Election Court be identified?

On Justice

by Nicolette Bethel

I'm a big fan of Law and Order -- the television show's that's been running for almost twenty years. I watch it religiously. It never gets old.

Recently I had the opportunity to watch a rerun I've seen dozens of times. The thing is, I couldn't remember what happened in it -- I know what the opening was all about, I knew where the case was going to lead, but the core principles I couldn't recall. So I watched it again to find out what they were.

I was glad I did. The main theme of the show was justice vs. politics. In a nutshell, it's the show where a man who organizes tours, in a moment of weakness, shoots at his travel agent to stop her from depositing a cheque. The idea is just to wound her, to give him time to put the money in his bank account. The plan works, all too well. The travel agent deposits the cheque late and the cheque doesn't bounce -- but two other people are killed as a result of the shooting, and the man is caught and charged.

What to do About Crime in the Bahamas

by Larry Smith

With all the shock-horror at our skyrocketing crime rate, you would never believe that the causes and progress of the country's social breakdown have been fully documented over the past 20-odd years by a series of special reports.

They were produced by the 1984 commission of inquiry into drug smuggling and the task force on drug abuse, the 1994 task force on education and the consultative committee on youth development, and the 1998 national crime commission.

What did that last report conclude? Well, the commissioners (a judge, a psychiatrist, a criminologist, social workers and clergymen) warned that Bahamian society was threatened by "a pervasive culture of dishonesty, greed and a casual disregard for social norms and regulation."

Four years earlier, the education task force had pointed to a "deterioration of traditional values and accepted standards of behaviour", which had produced "the scourge of teenage pregnancy and substance abuse." And previous reports had detailed the rise of lawlessness caused by narcotics trafficking.

Christie's Leadership of the PLP Called into Question by MP's Defection

by Craig Butler

I don’t know how many of you read Nicki Kelly’s column in the Punch, but if you don’t you should. There is not much of redeeming value in that newspaper - maybe two or three pieces - and this is one of them.

Recently Ms. Kelly did what few have done since this mess with former PLP Member of Parliament Kenyatta Gibson erupted - she dealt him a quick blow with her guillotine pen, dismissing him into the political jungle from where there is seemingly no return. What was written bears repeating so I take the liberty to do so:

"Want to know a person’s character? Let them become involved in politics. As recent events have shown, their true nature will quickly bubble to the surface. Regardless of the spin being put on his behaviour by certain members of the PLP, Kennedy MP Kenyatta Gibson’s resignation from the party revealed a mean-spirited and self-absorbed individual with no class.

"Whatever his perceived grievances with Leader Perry Christie, his gutter characterization of the former prime minister, who saved his hide when others wanted to skin him, was unconscionable. Not only did Mr. Gibson not advise Mr. Christie of his decision, leaving him to learn of it second-hand, he did not have sufficient respect for his constituents to tell them at least before informing the media."

The Bahamas is at an Environmental Tipping Point

by Larry Smith

Over the holidays Tough Call spent time in two of our fastest-growing out island boom towns - Spanish Wells and Marsh Harbour. And for the past couple of years this column has been writing about critical development issues facing New Providence.

I am no expert (although I play one in the media), but as a reasonably close observer and a concerned citizen I have concluded that the Bahamas is reaching a tipping point - in more ways than one. Last week's column ended with a promise to look at what the future of the Bahamian environment will be like. Well, the short answer is that it will be shaped by what we are doing today.

For decades the Family Islands have been rural and remote. And the pressures now building on New Providence were not so daunting in the recent past. We could complacently overlook many of the unpleasant side effects of development and population growth because, by and large, things weren't that bad.

But now the chickens are coming home to roost. The problems are both multiplying and magnifying. And if we are not very careful, we stand to lose not only our quality of life but our very existence as a functioning society. Here are just a few of the more 'in your face' examples of these problems, culled from recent visits to North Eleuthera and Abaco.

Is the PLP Imploding? Will a Black Man Gain the US Presidency?

by Craig Butler

It’s only two weeks into the New Year and we’ve already experienced four murders, one of which was carried out in broad daylight downtown on a schoolboy.

Despite the above, headlines were dominated by the fracas that has occurred in the Progressive Liberal Party over over the withdrawal of Kenyatta Gibson from the party's parliamentary caucus.

If the rumblings are to be believed, Mr. Gibson was upset at the leadership for what he perceived to be their acquiescence over incursions made by others into his constituency. The failure to cause those persons to cease and desist led to his decision.

Conjuring a Prehistoric Bahamian Landscape at the Abaco Science Conference

by Larry Smith

MARSH HARBOUR, Abaco —"Man, I got no time for these politicians and civil servants," John Hedden snorted derisively, lounging on his ramshackle verandah deep in the Abaco pineyard.

His long grey hair was pulled back into an untidy ponytail, and a bottle of Appleton rum was slowly emptying as the afternoon sun sank beneath the pine trees out in the middle of nowhere.

Hedden - a one-time technical officer at the Ministry of Agriculture & Fisheries who quit years ago to 'rough' it in Abaco - is truly the master of all he surveys. From his little clapboard house, built with his own hands on a rise deep in the forest, it's a long, dusty haul down a disused logging track to reach the Great Abaco Highway.

"They come here and talk crap from time to time, but nothing ever happens. Our local communities have to take power for themselves and use it - Nassau ain't going to give it to them or do nothing for them."

The conversation had been sparked by the arrival of Minister of Works and Utilities Earl Deveaux (himself a former agricultural officer and a contemporary of Hedden's) who was in town to open the third bi-annual Science Alliance Conference put on by Abaco's Friends of the Environment.

America's CIA Legacy

by Larry Smith

"We went all over the world and we did what we wanted. God, we had fun." -- Al Ulmer, chief of the CIA's Far East division in the 1950s.

There was just one book on my holiday reading list this year - the 700-page Legacy of Ashes published recently by Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times investigative reporter, Tim Weiner.

It is an utterly absorbing history of the United States Central Intelligence Agency - from its foundation after World War Two to its recent humiliation after asserting that Iraq bristled with weapons of mass destruction.

Weiner presents on-the-record accounts taken from recently declassified documents as well as the personal recollections of those involved. And the bottom line is that “the most powerful country in the history of Western civilization has failed to create a first-rate spy service (and) that failure constitutes a danger to the national security of the United States.”

Wow! When Tough Call was a leftist college student in the early 1970s, the CIA was considered omnipotent - a mythical monster whose tentacles reached out to control the world. We believed it was capable of the most extraordinary things, and we detested its power and influence.