by Andrew Allen
The PLP's plans for a redevelopment of the city of Nassau, as outlined in the Prime Minister's convention speech, could not have come at a more opportune time.
As the country looks poised for its largest ever investment boom, the public and touristic centre of Nassau remains an eyesore in many places.
A visitor by sea to this island could be forgiven for wondering whether we who reside in and run the place know the first things about zoning and urban planning.
Where the cruise docks end abruptly, a series of warehouses and shipping companies occupy what is likely among the most valuable real estate in the country. Their presence in turn leads to traffic bottlenecks, as huge, loud trucks leaking sand and other cargo shuffle to and fro along Bay Street.
Further to the east, just adjacent to a bridge carrying guests to a multi-billion dollar resort, an old wreck of a dock, destroyed in a hurricane that passed through some years ago, sits half-submerged amidst the sunken remains of boats. Packs of mangy dogs hang around the smelly entrance to a run down 'market' area just at the point where tourists' first introduction to this side of the bridge begins.
In any well-run city, the municipal authorities would face the justified ire of the many stakeholders, including those who have invested billions in the tourist industry. They would be called to account for their inertia and lack of foresight and would probably be replaced every few months until a reasonably competent set was found.
But this, alas, is the Bahamas, where there are no municipal officials to call to account, and where central governments continue to delude themselves that they are capable single-handedly of running a city that hosts millions of visitors a year.
Why they continue to fail is clear enough. It has to do with the inability of central (political) governments to take local decisions based upon the greater common good for the locality itself. Unlike a mayor or a city manager, a central government's main concern is pitching all of their initiatives to the broader political electorate.
So the fact that it is from the governing party's national political convention that we were apprised of the latest plan is itself a troubling sign. It points us back to all the previous, much-vaunted but doomed attempts by governments to do something with the Bay Street area for which they could take credit.
It also suggests the danger that the same politicisation that undermined previous initiatives will soon enough emerge again. And this is something to which no central government is resistant.
If we recall, it took the last government just about all of the political will it could muster to confront the taxi drivers' resistance to an organised call-up system for the dock.
Perhaps with that experience in mind, the FNM was thereafter overly careful not to alienate the shipping companies and other interests that stood in the way of a much-discussed redevelopment of the whole waterfront from East Street to the Church Street bridge. So it never happened.
As for the present government, it remains to be seen how quickly all their talk of a plan for the city will falter before the cold hard realities of politics.
What is clear is that, like all of its predecessors, the PLP has absolutely no plan for transferring any real power and responsibility for the overall management of the city away from itself. That, presumably, would involve too much political risk.
It is, however, the only real hope of achieving a permanent solution to the problems of the city, by insulating its management from national party politics. That makes it a bullet worth biting.
Central governments simply have too broad and convoluted a constituency, and are too plagued by extraneous political considerations, to keep up the kind of steady commitment that the management of a city requires. Britain learned that lesson over a decade of fast economic growth that also saw the quality of its capital's services deteriorate immensely.
When Mrs Thatcher took apart the Greater London Council in the 1980s, she thought she was getting rid of a nuisance body that served no real purpose other than to oppose her policies for the capital.
She thought, too, that, as the centre of a massive national bureaucracy and government, London required no separate administrative organisation.
How wrong she was. When Mr Blair gave London back its local government (under Mrs Thatcher's old nemesis, Ken Livingstone) it was in part a reaction to the widespread perception that things had become intolerably bad for a city that simply had no co-ordinated management.
Here in The Bahamas, our political leaders seem to have decided that a robust economy, fuelled by foreign investment, will be enough to buy them the political mileage to do what all of their predecessors failed to do and redevelop the city of Nassau as a world-class port metropolis without delegating its management to a municipal authority.
Once again, they are very wrong.
nassau
nassau
nassau
what about the family islands?
Posted by: tb | December 02, 2005 at 01:55 PM