The Tribune

IT SEEMS that Prime Minister Christie’s plans to move full steam ahead to regain the remaining two per cent of Bahamas Telecommunications Company and return it to government control, will start in August. Already Mr Christie has appointed his committee of four — businessman Franklyn Wilson, former attorney general Sean McWeeney, Rowena Bethel from the Ministry of Finance, and Leon Williams, former BTC’s CEO.

While the Utilities Regulation & Competition Authority (URCA) is pushing the new owners of BTC to meet its efficiency targets, Mr Christie has given his committee orders to push from the other side to renegotiate ownership so that Bahamians can boast that they are the proud owners of their own telecoms network.

As far as those of us who for years have had the misfortune of working with the incompetence of a government-owned telecommunications company, it’s like going back to the stone age. But it seems that instead of making sound business decisions for the country, this government is going to rule by emotions and nationalistic sentimentality. This was the mumbo-jumbo that the late Dame Eugenia Charles, the brilliant former prime minister of Dominica, used to scorn.

According to URCA, Cable & Wireless’ “productivity levels remained below those of comparable operators.” URCA has set efficiency targets for BTC to achieve over a period of time. BTC’s new owners purchased 51 per cent stake of BTC in April last year for US$210 million.

Considering the “rubbish Cable & Wireless bought in its acquisition of BTC,” commented a Bahamian who knows the company well — he was referring to BTC’s obsolete equipment, much of which should never have been purchased, high costs and low staff productivity — what the new owners have already achieved is close to a miracle. To try to bring the achievement into our sphere of understanding, the Bahamian said “it’s like The Tribune going from hot type to web offset — there’s much yet to do, but still you are light years ahead of what you were.”

Mr Christie told of his meeting with Cable & Wireless CEO Tony Rice, who flew to the Bahamas from London last month especially for the meeting — and faced a blackout of all telecommunications on the island, which many of us are satisfied was sabotage to make a point to bolster Mr Christie’s argument that the company should be in “more competent” Bahamian hands.

Mr Christie has admitted that Mr Rice tried to talk him out of trying to take back control of BTC.

“He said to me,” Mr Christie told a reporter, “he’s going to make every effort for me to adopt his position, and of course, I said to him my difficulty is, it’s not what I think. It’s what the people who voted for me think and I can’t go back to them and tell them… in about the next four to five years.”

We presume what he was trying to say is that when his party faces another election in five years time he can’t face the electorate and say he failed to deliver their telecommunications company to them.

Again this sounds like the nonsense that the PLP talked to confuse Bahamian voters at the time of the 2002 referendum that was designed to give Bahamian women the same rights as Bahamian men. Then it was a failure to follow some imaginary process — what process was not followed we still have not discovered. Today it is a claim that the PLP were given a mandate by Bahamians at the polls to get BTC back.

As a staff member commented yesterday: All through the campaign the PLP kept adding to their 100 day promises. How does Mr Christie know how many — if any —voted to put his party back on condition that they return BTC? How does he know that most of them might have voted for the PLP only because they didn’t want a return of the Ingraham government? How can he honestly say that the people voted him in to reclaim BTC?

Just as Mr Christie said recently that although in the House of Assembly in 2002 his party had voted for the referendum for women, when a Seventh-Day Adventist pastor told him that his church had not been consulted on the referendum, he then decided that Bahamians needed another year to understand a simple question: Should Bahamian women have the same right to pass on their citizenship to their children as do Bahamian men? To think that even the dumbest of Bahamians needed a whole year to understand that question was to treat them with contempt. But that is just what the PLP did.

Since this comment a few days ago, a Seventh-Day Adventist has angrily denied that this was ever the case. We don’t know the truth — so we shall leave it with Mr Christie and the Adventists.

We see the same behind-the-scenes schemes being worked out with “the boys” greedily seeing a good thing and calling the shots. This too is Mr Christie’s Waterloo, but don’t blame it on John Q. Public who hasn’t a clue what the stakes are and still can’t figure out how the Bahamas government’s ownership of BTC will personally benefit him.

But, those Bahamians with an ounce of business sense and who understand what is happening will agree with an important investor who sees this attempt to take back BTC as nationalisation. It’s going the way of Argentina and Venezuela, he investor predicted.

“From this point on,” he said, “this country is on a slippery slope down… it has sent a chilling message down the spine of every investor.”

In his opinion, the PLP government does not understand that an investor invests on the understanding that one government honours the agreements of another. Shatter that presumption, and your investors will be off looking for greener pastures.