Bahama Pundit

The Life and Death of Bahamian Political Parties

by Larry Smith

“Mistaken publications of obituaries aren’t as rare as you might expect,” observes The Phrase Finder website. In 1897, for example, the American writer and humourist Mark Twain famously sent a letter to the New York Journal describing a report of his death as an "exaggeration."

We could say the same about the most recent prognostications on the future of the Progressive Liberal Party. And this is not the first time we have heard them. After the 1997 election - when the Free National Movement won 57.6% of the vote with a turnout of 92% - commentators were convinced that the PLP was headed straight for "the boneyard."

That was only five years after the party had suffered its first and only major defeat in a quarter century of absolute ascendancy under the leadership of the late Sir Lynden Pindling. And it was only five years before it won a stunning landslide upset, taking 51.7% of the vote in a turnout of 89%.

Clearly, as the American writer Will Rogers put it: “Both political parties have their good times and bad times, only they have them at different times.”

Leadership Choices for the FNM

by Simon

•Simon is a young Bahamian with things on his mind who wishes to remain anonymous. His column 'Front Porch' is published every Tuesday in the Nassau Guardian. He can be reached at frontporchguardian@gmail.com.

Last week’s Front Porch focused on the leadership choices for the Opposition PLP.  Before looking at the FNM’s choices we should recall why the road ahead for the PLP will be long and hard.  

Those calling for the PLP to quickly recover from its electoral defeat two years ago as well as a spate of recent scandals and problems may be jumping the gun.  The main task before the PLP is stabilization and triage.  Only then comes recovery.  The basis for this assessment is not FNM propaganda, it’s PLP candor. 

Bahamian Links to Tarpon Springs and the Death of the Sponge Trade

by Larry Smith

TARPON SPRINGS, Florida—As the mist rolled in across the bayou, local community leaders gathered at the Heritage Museum here last Thursday evening to celebrate their shared history with the Bahamas.

This city of 23,000 on Florida's west coast - about 30 miles north of Tampa - has had a Bahamian connection ever since an "adventurer from Nassau" named Joshua Boyer started the first family homestead here in 1877. At the time, both black and white Bahamian 'conchs' were hooking sponges and catching turtles from Key West all the way up the undeveloped gulf coast.

In a 1928 newspaper article, Boyer reminisced about those pioneer days: "I came up the Anclote River on a fishing trip and by chance stopped off at Mr. Ormond's residence. I built a residence there, and the same year Miss Mary Ormond and I were married. Everything there was ours. The land and the game and fish were as free as air."

Sponger Money Never Done
But the biggest and best-known Bahamian connection - and the one that was celebrated last week - is the link between the Greek communities of Tarpon Springs and Nassau. Both had their origins in the sponge trade, which lasted less than a century and was one of the biggest revenue earners for both the Bahamas and Florida. As the song goes, in those days it seemed that sponger money was never done.

Leadership Choices for the PLP

by Simon

•Simon is a young Bahamian with things on his mind who wishes to remain anonymous. His column 'Front Porch' is published every Tuesday in the Nassau Guardian. He can be reached at frontporchguardian@gmail.com.

Last week, responding to a deafening drumbeat of “woe-is-me, shame and scandal in the family”, Perry Christie insisted that the PLP is not in crisis.  Mr. Christie is correct. The party is not in a crisis.  It is in meltdown.  In desperate need of hope and help, the PLP continues to move forwards never and backwards ever.

Mr. Christie appears to be as delusional in opposition as he was in government. He is bargaining that if he keeps saying there is no crisis, then there is no crisis. And if he ignores something long enough, it will eventually go away.  Apparently, the loss of a fool-proof majority after a single term was not sufficient cause for concern. 

Nor is a procession of bad news, including a leaked confidential report last year on the problems within the PLP, criminal charges against a former Senator, the loss of election cases and the charge of two former chairmen -- Messrs. Galanis and Rigby -- that their party has lost its way.

Keynes, the Economy and the Technological Singularity

by Larry Smith

"We are suffering just now from a bad attack of economic pessimism, wrote the famous British economist John Maynard Keynes in a 1930 essay. "It is common to hear people say that....a decline in prosperity is more likely than an improvement in the decade which lies ahead of us."

Keynes was one of the most renowned economist of his day, and his theories of deficit spending to stimulate demand were the global economic orthodoxy from the time of the Great Depression until the 1970s. They are now coming back into fashion as the world economy collapses around us.

But in this instance Keynes was no doomsayer. At the beginning of the Depression - which was to last 15 years until the outbreak of the second world war in 1945 - he wrote a 4,000-word essay entitled Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, in which he called the understandable pessimism of his day mistaken.

Change We Can Believe In

by Simon

•Simon is a young Bahamian with things on his mind who wishes to remain anonymous. His column 'Front Porch' is published every Tuesday in the Nassau Guardian. He can be reached at frontporchguardian@gmail.com.

Benjamin Netanyahu, a former Israeli prime minister and perennial PM in waiting has copied Barack Obama’s presidential campaign website as some politicians at home are promoting “change” agendas. 

Neither, is change we can believe in.  The belligerent and intolerant Netanyahu has the conciliation skills of Genghis Khan, and the language of change is empty rhetoric unless manifested in meaningful ways.

As argued here previously we do not need nor should we pine for a Bahamian Obama.  This does not mean that our politicians can not draw lessons from this extraordinary figure.

Marine Reserves and the Survival of Nassau Groupers

b y Larry Smith

Boil' fish fans beware -  the Nassau grouper is not long for this world.

According to Dr Yvonne Sadovy, one of the world's top grouper experts who is working with the Department of Marine Resources, data projections show that the Bahamian grouper fishery will collapse within a decade unless it is better managed.

That means we will join the other 33 countries in the region where this resource has been overfished to the point of commercial extinction. Like cod in the north Atlantic, the Nassau grouper - once the most common food fish around the region reaching a weight of 50 pounds or more - is now on the endangered list. In fact, 20 of the world’s 162 species of grouper are threatened with extinction by overfishing.

And one of the big reasons is their unusual reproductive behaviour. Every year at full moon in December and January, Nassau groupers migrate long distances from their home reefs to specific sites where they form spawning aggregations.

A Bahamian Obama?

by Simon

•Simon is a young Bahamian with things on his mind who wishes to remain anonymous. His column 'Front Porch' is published every Tuesday in the Nassau Guardian. He can be reached at frontporchguardian@gmail.com.

Whatever one’s opinion on the strengths and weaknesses or successes and failures of Hubert Ingraham and Perry Christie as Prime Minister, there is a fact upon which all can agree: both leaders are nearing the end of their political journeys.

At ages 61 and 63 respectively, they are currently the longest serving members of the House and have been on the national stage for about half of their lives and most of our post-independence history.  Both entered the House in 1977 with Mr. Christie having been appointed to the Senate in 1974.