The Tribune

EDITOR, The Tribune.

It is mind-bogglingly unbelievable to know how inefficiently gubments operate in this country, especially when it comes to maintenance! I have been saying all too often lately: “Make it make sense” to try and comprehend how gubments think (or rather do not think) and waste huge swaths of taxpayer’s money without any compunction or consequence.

This foolishness has to stop! We are right back down the rabbit hole in Wonderland, big time!

Last year in December, I saw a television news clip with the Sports Minister assuring the public with much fanfare and aplomb that the Betty Kelly-Kenning Aquatics Centre’s pool would be ready for the upcoming CARIFTA Aquatics Championship to be held in Nassau during the Easter weekend in 2024. The pool and the Thomas A. Robinson National Stadium were, at that time, undergoing significant repairs. The camera then panned over the pool area and all I could see was green water! I was perplexed to see the unusable swimming pool – the only one in the island at that length and configuration, as I understand it – where our top notch swimming teams practised daily in order to keep them primed to retain their winning titles!

Imagine my surprise to find upon recent investigation that the pool had been shut down and drained ‘for cleaning’ since the end of July 2023 right after the Bahamas Games!! Yet here it was in December 2023, filled with algae (no doubt from sitting there with stagnant rain water)! So, why, pray tell, had the pool not been refurbished as was promised up to that date? Make it make sense!

So here it is now, February 2024, and seven months later with the CARIFTA Aquatic Championship due to be held here in a month’s time. Has any work been done on the pool at all I wonder? Can you imagine what an even worse state that pool must be in now, due to eight months of continuous lack of proper maintenance? Why? Make it make sense!

In addition, the swim teams have also not had access to the proper facilities to practice in for that length of time – do you know what that does to your training as an athlete? Make it make sense!

But wait, there is more! Guess what the gubment’s brilliant solution apparently is to the problem arising from their simple inefficiency to carry out the cleaning/refurbishment of the pool in July 2023? To propose that the CARIFTA trial competitions to select the Bahamian CARIFTA team be in Florida if the pool is not ready in 2 weeks (when it should have been cleaned and ready since July 2023)! So that means paying for a selected Bahamian team (who haven’t been able to practice in the pool properly for seven months) to travel there by air (their parents will have to pay their own way if they wish to go to support them), be accommodated and fed for 2 days on you, me, and we the people’s dime with funds from the Treasury!

We are way down in that Wonderland rabbit hole, Bahamas! The mind boggles because it simply does NOT make any sense whatsoever!

PAM BURNSIDE

Nassau, Bahamas

February 21, 2024