Bahama Pundit

Hubert Ingraham’s Progressive Agenda – 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.

Hubert Ingraham is a firebrand, similar to other political figures, including a famous eight, who left a once forward-thinking turned inward-looking party to pursue progressive dreams and liberal ideals he and similar dissidents concluded they could no longer advance through the Progressive Liberal Party.

Never limited to the struggle for racial equality, the broader struggle for social justice is a movement which has stirred the passions of generations of Bahamians, often taking root in but transcending partisan political affiliations.

The Great Wilson City Power Plant Mystery

by Larry Smith

Concerns have been raised by environmentalists about Abaco's new power plant at Wilson City, which is now under construction. Very little information on this $105 million project has been divulged by either the government or BEC, so fears are being fed by rumours. Tough Call has reviewed the EIA for the plant that was completed in October 2008 by KES Environmental Services Inc of Florida. This report tries to cut through some of the obscurity.

The Environmental Impact Assessment for the 48 megawatt power plant now being built on Abaco is more interesting for what it reveals about BEC's environmental management than for what it tells us about this huge project deep in the pine forest.

Tough Call visited the power plant site a few days ago. It lies some 14 miles south of Marsh Harbour, five miles east of the Abaco Highway, and about two miles from the coastal ruins of Wilson City, the fabulous lumber town that operated for about 10 years in the early 1900s.

The Casuarina Controversy

 by Neil Sealey

Neil Sealey was a geography professor at the College of the Bahamas from 1979 to 1995. He edited The Bahamas Journal of Science - published by Media Enterprises from 1993 to 2004 - and is the author of six books, including Tourism in the Caribbean (Hodder & Stoughton, 1982), Bahamian Landscapes (Macmillan Caribbean 2006) and Caribbean World (Cambridge University Press, 1992). He was also editorial consultant for Macmillan Caribbean's 2000 edition of Caribbean Certificate Atlas.

It is unfortunate that a number of persons seem to have missed the point about the removal of casuarinas along our shorelines.

Correspondents, columnists and editors have all written recently in support of ‘saving’ the casuarinas along Saunders Beach. However, these are not being removed for any perverse satisfaction of denying people shade, a view of the sea, or the visual appearance of these large trees. It is simply a matter of preserving another natural resource, in this case the beach and adjacent property and infrastructure, and ensuring that our coastline is able to withstand storm waves in an era of climate change and sea level rise.

The reason the sea is visible through the trees is because the natural dune and its accompanying vegetation, as it exists at Orange Hill, Delaporte and Paradise Island at present (and many Family Islands), has been lost. Extensive scientific study in this country and elsewhere has established that casuarinas will prevent the growth of native vegetation resulting in the decline of the attendant sand dune and exposure of the coast to erosion.

Hope Town Becomes a Battleground Over Out Island Development

by Larry Smith

Despite the economic downturn, a new fight is brewing over development in the out islands - this time the battleground is Hope Town - one of the most successful family island communities. Tough Call visited Abaco over the weekend to take a closer look at a controversial proposal to redevelop the old Elbow Cay Club.

HOPE TOWN, Abaco -- Skimming over the shallow Sea of Abaco past the familiar striped lighthouse that marks the best-known harbour in the Bahamas, we arrive at a small cove backed by a handful of low-rise buildings. The shoreline is punctuated by a crumbling wooden pier.

Here, tucked away out of sight of the settlement, are the remains of New Hope Lodge - a camp for recovering alcoholics founded by American Ruth Kenyon-Lundgren on nine acres of undeveloped land back in the 1950s. Ruth has now left the Bahamas, but in her time she had a big impact on the little community of Hope Town.

New Hope was eventually sold to a Danish-Canadian investor named Robert Maltarp, while Ruth went on to buy the former commissioner's residence in the settlement, adding a three-storey wing to create the Harbour Lodge. Later, she operated the nearby Abaco Inn (then called the Fin and Tonic). Both are 20-room boutique hotels.

In the meantime, Maltarp had acquired 10 more acres and turned New Hope into the Elbow Cay Club, which operated rather unsuccessfully as a typical out island inn throughout the 60s and 70s. It later became a rooming house for locals, eventually descending to its present status as a Haitian ghetto - probably the only "resort" for immigrants in the country.

Elbow Cay is five miles long and half a mile wide, and the tiny settlement of Hope Town retains immense rustic appeal. An ever-widening patchwork of roads and upscale subdivisions radiates from the picturesque settlement harbour.  And the island is home to high-flying lawyers, politicians, architects and corporate bigwigs. Abaconians refer to the place as "Hollywood".

A Laughable Letter Backfires

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.

A brilliantly composed letter to the editor by Joan Thompson, President of the Nassau Institute, recently appearing in two dailies, should be used in C.O.B. freshman courses ranging from Introduction to Basic Logic to How Not to Write: 101.

The letter demonstrates, masterfully, how failed satire can turn into self-parody and how a scaffold of poor arguments collapses under the weight of false premises.  Writing back to an editor, insisting one’s opinion was intended as satire, is akin to a stand-up comedienne having to remind the audience to laugh at her jokes.

In an explanatory note to the editor of The Tribune, the letter’s author notes: “The article was intended satire, not a serious proposal for a system of education. This was lost in the edited version of the original.”  Unfortunately, the satire also failed in the original version.

'If you want to have a debate, fine. If you want to lie, get a radio show.'

by Larry Smith

The headline for this article is a recent quote from a CNN commentator talking about healthcare reform in the United States. But it could just as easily refer to the utter nonsense circulating about Arawak Cay in the Bahamas.

The argument in the US has been fueled by Sarah Palin's charge that President Obama plans to set up "death panels" to force euthanasia on old folks and the disabled. And at least one Democratic congressman has received death threats for his support of healthcare reform.

Here at home, the conspiracy theory marketed by PLP Senator Jerome Fitzgerald and his crew of political operatives accuses Deputy Prime Minister Brent Symonette of masterminding the white oligarchy's plot to secretly enrich themselves from a new port at Arawak Cay.

In fact, the entire debate over the multi-million-dollar road improvements, harbour dredging, downtown revitalisation, future of the shipping industry, and public disclosure has been hijacked and reduced to the PLP's racially divisive 2007 election slogan: "No turning back".

Reality Checks in Education

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.

There is a sustained and critical national dialogue on the state and direction of Bahamian education, most intensely as regards primary through secondary education in our public school system.

Success in reforming public education will be achieved through pragmatic solutions, borrowing ideas from across the ideological spectrum while challenging those including, sometimes, union leaders opposed to reforms such as merit pay, and more testing of and review of tenure standards for teachers.

Success will require a broad rethinking by political leaders, the education bureaucracy and parents as to how schools are run, the quality of in-school leadership and what a truly magnet school system may look like in New Providence and Grand Bahama.

But success will be stymied by ideological fantasies as typified in a letter to the press by the president of a local think-tank, which proposed a single thread-bare argument producing this logical fallacy and tautological disaster: public education is a failure because, well, it’s public education, or the equivalent of teaching little Johnnie and Jenny that the sky is blue, because the sky is blue.

Giving the public good information is not the same as sticking your backside in the air.

by Larry Smith

The debate over the port relocation, the harbour dredging and the future of Saunders Beach gradually ratcheted into a controversy and has now turned into a raucous political brawl.

Prime Minister Ingraham says the government can't afford to concentrate on repeatedly refuting inaccuracies. It has to get on with the job of running the country in some of the most difficult times of the past half century.

There is some truth to this. In fact, it brings to mind Winston Churchill's remark that a government can't be always feeling its pulse and taking its temperature: "A politician with his ear to the ground must inevitably have his bottom in the air," Churchill said.