Bahama Pundit

Landmark Communications Bill About to Change Industry Forever

by Larry Smith

If you work for Cable Bahamas or the phone companies, you may have a vague idea that BTC's pending privatisation (a process that began in 1997) will bring some changes to the Bahamian communications landscape.

Well, you would be wrong.

As a matter of fact, BTCs sale will be a watershed for our media and telecoms industries because everything will change. And we do mean everything - including ZNS and Cable Bahamas. In fact, reshaping the national communications landscape will probably go down as Hubert Ingraham's greatest legacy.

Until recently, like most others I was a die-hard skeptic in this regard. But after mingling with industry representatives during a four-hour consultation meeting at the British Colonial Hilton last Friday, I sense a climate of change similar to the early 1990s, when the stultifying state monopoly on broadcasting was finally broken.

Falling Into Racial Traps – Pt. 2

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.

Racism and prejudice do not always flow from hatred.  Its genesis is simpler, as stated in last week’s column: “There are degrees of racism, but they are all founded on the singular proposition that one group is intrinsically unequal or inferior to another.” 

Such racism becomes diabolical when it is fastened to power and used to degrade or destroy a category of people based on capricious racial codes intended to serve systems of supremacy, both social and economic.

Many of America’s Founders were learned men committed to the idea -- if not the fact -- of equality.  They were also slave owners who “loved” their chattel so much that even enlightened men such as Thomas Jefferson, America’s third President, appears to have produced at least one child with his slave Sally Hemmings.

PLP Contradictions Over the Pindling Legacy

by Larry Smith

Just over 20 years ago, a group of top British investigative journalists left their jobs at the Sunday Times to piece together the fantastic tale of the cocaine trade in Colombia, the Bahamas and Miami.

Their explosive 1988 book - the Cocaine Wars - described how Carlos Lehder, the Colombian cartel's transport chief, took control of an island in the Exumas "while the government of Prime Minister Sir Lynden Pindling did its best to help him feel at home."

The story goes back to the early 1970s. Within a year of independence, Bahamian police were warning that drug trafficking was a "serious«problem," a US Senate report noted, "and by 1979, that problem was a crisis....both narcotics smuggling and government corruption grew at an extraordinary rate."

Falling Into Racial Traps – Part 1

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.

It is quite easy to fall into racial traps. Thankfully, with the election of Barack Obama some of those traps are becoming more obvious, if no less disturbing and often just as tragically comical. 

The latest insult black Americans are facing after generations of racial injury and injustice is the weird notion by many more whites than one might imagine that Obama is really not black after all.   

This is odd because for some, he is, in the words of a racist song, “Barack, the Magic Negro”. And for others he has magically gone from a black Senator to a mixed-race President of the United States.

Undersea Photography Sparked Bahamian Conservation Movement

by Larry Smith

Were it not for a series of serendipitous events decades ago, many of the Bahamas' most precious natural resources might have been lost forever. And it all began with the first attempts at underwater photography.

The Bahamas featured prominently in early undersea filmmaking because of our crystal-clear, unpolluted waters. The Williamson Photosphere (whose rusting hulk lies somewhere in the national archives), was a submersible device used to film the world's first underwater movie in the Bahamas.

Based on Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, this silent film was a major box office hit back in 1916. The photosphere was later involved in recovering coral from the Bahamas to build a live reef display at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History. And it served for a time as a unique underwater post office, where collectible letters were stamped and posted from Sea Floor, Bahamas.

The Grand Old Progressive Liberal Party

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.

From the performance of many of its members during last week’s mid-year budget review in the House one might have thought that the PLP hasn’t been in office for decades.

While all parties play the revisionist game, those out of office tend to play it more aggressively because they lack the power to advance their agenda.  Apparently both political success and failure make for strange bedfellows, even for parties that may not be ideologically aligned.

Having fallen from office after a period of failed governance and faced with the challenge of mounting an effective opposition during a severe economic downturn, the Republican Party (GOP) in the US and the Progressive Liberal Party are revising history, albeit in different ways.

Abaco and the Need for Heritage Tourism

by Larry Smith

HOPE TOWN, Abaco -- In 1976 the late American writer Alex Haley won a Pulitzer Prize for Roots, a historical novel said to have been based on his family history, starting with an African named Kunta Kinte who was kidnapped into slavery.

The book was adapted into a sensational TV mini-series that played endlessly on ZNS whenever election time rolled around. And while it later transpired that Haley's specific genealogical claims did not pan out, in the end that did not matter - they were generically true.

Although critics condemned the book as fraudulent, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr put it this way: "Roots is a work of the imagination rather than strict historical scholarship. It was an important event because it captured everyone's imagination."

Tough Call could produce a similarly fanciful account that would be just as accurate in its own way - an idea that took shape this past weekend while attending Hope Town's Heritage Day.

Bishop Boyd’s Audacity of Hope

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.

Fixated on finding a Bahamian Obama in the political arena, we have neglected like figures in other areas of national life.  As previously argued, while admiring the new President, we should not be searching for his clone here at home.

Alternatively, we should encourage leaders who exhibit many of Mr. Obama’s finer qualities while being authentic to their own human journey and our national story.  One such leader is newly-enthroned Anglican Bishop Laish Boyd.

Bishop Boyd and President Obama are not only around the same age, they also share a progressive spirit while being rooted in age-old traditions which they seek to renew for a new age.  Their primary instrument of renewal: the audacity of hope!

TCI Commission of Inquiry Outlines Massive Corruption and Misrule

by Larry Smith

In 2005 our then prime minister, Perry Christie, was invited to open the new legislative building in the Turks & Caicos Islands. Mr Christie said the parliament would be a forum for "bold and innovative ideas", and he was certainly right about that.

In fact, the ideas were so bold they led straight to a British-appointed commission of inquiry into corruption and misrule that handed a "wide-ranging" preliminary report to the governor this past weekend. The recommendations will not be published immediately, and a final report is not due until the end of April.

The commission was appointed last year to inquire into corruption among members of the legislature. It is led by a British jurist (Sir Robin Auld), who took part in the 1967 inquiry into casino gambling in the Bahamas. Four weeks of public hearings at the Regent Palms Hotel on Provo ended on February 11, and the commission is now working on its report in London.