The Tribune

EDITOR, The Tribune.

It is with great and predictable fanfare that the FNM and its allies have suddenly begun to promote the sordid tales emerging about Lyford Cay resident Peter Nygard and his legal travails abroad.

Sensing well-earned defeat at the polls, the party of special interests has no real electoral hope other than to shift the discussion away from policy and into the territory of scandal, gossip and sleaze, where untested allegations and historic prejudices hopefully favour it.

In 2007, it was the Anna Nicole affair, when a photo of the late starlet lying in a bed next to Shane Gibson nearly even jolted this letter writer (then a recovering FNM) into relapse. It clearly did the trick with enough wavering Bahamians to tip the scales in favour of a narrow FNM victory.

In the ensuing term, Ingraham’s FNM sold BTC and gave a conglomerate dominated by a few families a monopoly on international freight traffic into Nassau. These were no doubt among the reasons the electorate rejected Ingraham in 2012. Not scandal, but policy.

In 2017, the leader and chairman of the FNM were caught red-handed scheming with two purported “gangsters” about how to cook up scandal against the PLP. Again, despite all the warnings, the electorate took the bait.

The ensuing Minnis government wasted no time in nearly doubling VAT (while reassuring Lyford Cay it won’t raise taxes on their luxury homes), slashing social spending, giving Minister Symonnette’s company the tenancy of the general post office and conveying the Nassau cruise port into a few privileged hands.

This time, it is clear that the Nygard affair will be the primary weapon of distraction away from large issues of policy and onto petty issues of sleaze and scandal – issues that have not been proved in a court, one might add.

Meanwhile, on the same day that tongues were wagging about Peter Nygard and PLP politicians, minister Kwasi Thompson was confirming that, with a 280 percent deficit increase and armed police on the streets hunting down jobless Bahamians to ticket and thence make up the shortfall, his government is not even considering income tax, the mechanism that is accepted internationally as the standard of progressive taxation (i.e. shifting the burden from the poor to the rich).

In a hundred years, Peter Nygard, this writer and everyone reading this letter will long have been swept into the tide of history. New actors will be on the scene and new scandals will regale all and sundry.

But the results of FNM policy will still linger. The sole port through which the residents of the busiest island in The Bahamas are fed, clothed and provided the materials of life will likely still be overwhelmingly owned by a small group of families.

BTC (if it even still exists) will have likely enriched many people outside The Bahamas but long since ceased to serve the needs of this country – slashed investment in technology, infrastructure and human resources have characterised it since privatisation.

Regressive taxes, privileged healthcare and a criminally low minimum wage may very well still be the order of the day, prolonging the angry, maladjusted and economically sluggish society that we have today.

Who then will remember the sordid tales of Peter Nygard?

ANDREW ALLEN

Nassau,

February 2, 2021.