Bahama Pundit

Reform Versus the Status Quo in 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.

Despite his talk, talk and more talk, Perry Christie is not a reformer, an innovator nor a paradigm shifter as he endlessly brags.  Just the opposite: he continues to preside over and protect hidebound and entrenched interests within the PLP.

When Sir Lynden handed over leadership of the PLP to Mr. Christie following its crushing 1997 electoral defeat, he further bequeathed to the party’s only third leader in over half a century, a political culture characterized by a sense of entitlement. 

An entitlement that the PLP should govern in perpetuity and a bizarre notion that it is traitorous for the Leader of the PLP to be challenged from within his own party.  It is precisely this entitlement mentality that Prime Minister Ingraham was mocking in the House of Assembly, when he advised Mr. Christie to crush his opponents, utilizing all the tools at his disposal to so do.

Tough Call is on Vacation this Week

See you next week.

The Death Penalty in the Bahamas

by Larry Smith

Let the punishment be equal with the offence.
-- Cicero

"In the end, it is the poor who are selected to die."
-- Sister Helen Prejean

At a College of the Bahamas seminar recently, I sat next to a first-year law student who had a degree in criminal justice from an American college. When asked what should be done to address crime, the first word out of her mouth was "hanging".

And it appears that most preachers are also firmly in favour of the death penalty, although it flies in the face of everything written in the New Testament. Indeed, some would have no objection to turning the clock back centuries and making executions into a public spectacle.

The PLP’s Great Dilemma

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.

The PLP is in a classic bind that might be posed as a question:  How to wrest the party from the grasp of a failed leader who, in all likelihood, will lead the party to defeat at the next general election, yet who may be unbeatable as Leader?

This bind is emblematic of not only Mr. Christie’s problems, but also of the weakness of his opponents, the weak standing of a number of the party’s potential Leaders with the general public, as well as the dysfunction in a party that enjoyed an overwhelming parliamentary majority just two and a half years ago.

In the run up to its long-awaited national convention, various Leaders-in-waiting are attempting to answer this question through their own stratagems and calculations.  

Attacking Homelessness on New Providence

by Larry Smith

A pilot study of the Potters Cay area by the Ministry of Labour and Social Development has provided a snapshot of homelessness in Nassau, focusing renewed attention on this issue.

More than 50 homeless people live in this area, which extends to Okra Hill and St Matthew's graveyard. They are mostly men over 25 years of age, who are mentally ill, drug addicts or repeat offenders. Many have been released from Fox Hill Prison or Sandilands Rehabilitatiion Centre, and some are homeless by choice.

They are attracted to Potters Cay, the report says, by the availability of gambling, drugs and prostitution, as well as the opportunity to earn money from begging and casual labour. Another attraction for this location - considered the nexus of homelessness on New Providence - is the number of sleeping options.

These range from the tombs at nearby cemeteries, to abandoned buildings, vendors' stalls, trailers and boats. But the hub of activity for the homeless is the former fish processing plant on Potters Cay, which was built by the government in 1982 at a cost of $3.6 million and has been derelict for years. It has become an unmanaged shelter for society's outcasts.

The Universal Struggle for Democracy

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.

Those Bahamians prone towards romanticizing America’s republican form of government, while failing to appreciate more fully the time-tested rationale, genius, sophistication and flexibility of our own democratic heritage, do themselves, our parliamentary democracy and young Bahamians a national disservice.

To borrow a catchphrase, it isn’t that our system has been tried and found wanting: it’s that it often hasn’t been more fully tried and understood. 

A TRIBUTE TO SIR CLEMENT MAYNARD

by Sir Arthur Foulkes

“If there is no struggle there is no progress.  There are those who profess to favour freedom and yet deprecate agitation.  They want crops without plowing up the ground.  They want rain without thunder and lightning.  They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.” -- Frederick Douglas

We mourn the loss of Clement Trevelyan Maynard but also celebrate his life and service as one of the founders of our modern, stable, fully emancipated and democratic Commonwealth of The Bahamas.

He served his country for three decades in the highest echelons of our government and contributed mightily to our economic, social, political and constitutional development.

I join with all Bahamians in expressing our gratitude for his long and excellent service to our country in the many ministerial portfolios he held with distinction over these years, including that of Minister of Tourism and Deputy Prime Minister.

Bahamas Hotel Corporation—Relic of Past Corruption

by Larry Smith

Well, it seems that Perry Christie and George Smith have set themselves up as defenders of the Hotel Corporation of the Bahamas.

This is a big mistake, because it shows that the current leadership of the PLP is rooted in the past and has learnt nothing from the party's 30 years in power - or its electoral defeats since 1992.

Both men are emblematic of a discredited legacy. Smith was a PLP cabinet minister and Exuma MP when Colombian gangsters used his constituency with impunity as a smuggling base. He figured prominently in the 1984 commission of inquiry into drug corruption, and was resurrected as the Hotel Corporation's chairman during the PLP's last term.

Christie was fired from the PLP cabinet when it was rumoured that he and fellow minister Hubert Ingraham intended to resign over drug trafficking, but he soon returned to the fold. And he secured his succession to the PLP throne by defending former Hotel Corporation chairman Sir Lynden Pindling during the 1993 commission of inquiry into corruption and incompetence.

It Could Only Happen In America?

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.

After Barack Obama’s nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court many Americans gushed: “It could only happen in America.” 

America is rightly proud that its first African-American President elevated the first Hispanic (female) to that country’s highest court.  America is an extraordinary country and the Sotomayor appointment was an equally extraordinary moment.

Bahamians should be similarly proud that our first prime minister, Sir Lynden Pindling, was the son of an immigrant father, as were some of our other modern Founders who were the offspring of at least one foreign-born parent, as is Barack Obama.