The Tribune

EDITOR, The Tribune.

Hundreds of Bahamians from all walks of life took time out from their busy schedule to pay their last respects to the late Rev Dr Earle Francis at his home-going service at the Enoch Beckford Memorial Auditorium on April 12.

An icon in the Baptist community, Francis left behind an unblemished track record of service to the Christian community and the wider Bahamian public.

Francis and his devoted wife of 66 years had 13 children. He loved his wife dearly and affectionately nicknamed her ‘‘Sweet Potato”.

Francis was a man’s man. In an era when so many pastors are either succumbing to the winds of compromise or to the temptations of the carnal nature, Francis remained a beacon of morality – a virtue which has become all too uncommon in the pulpits across this archipelago.

The Whistleblower remembers Francis promising to give a dollar to every kid who attended service at his First Baptist Church in Coconut Grove.

God blessed him with 92 years – eight years short of a century. Among the dignitaries in attendance at Francis’ home-going service was Prime Minister Perry Christie.

The PM, during his terse eulogy of Francis, rightly lauded him as a dean of the Baptist clergy and a Bahamian patriot of the first order.

The Whistleblower is of the view, however, that the PM didn’t go far enough in eulogising the Baptist giant.

By that, he means that Christie should’ve used that occasion to issue an official apology on behalf of the PLP to the Francis family for the ill-manner in which Sir Lynden Pindling treated Carlton Francis, who was a brother of Earle Francis.

Historians tell us that a gaunt-looking Francis was spotted by Pindling at a PLP event and the leader cruelly joked about his former Cabinet colleague’s thin appearance to his PLP audience.Pindling remarked that all he could see was a three-piece suit. Francis had lost significant weight due to cancer. He died in December 1985.

The most disheartening aspect of Pindling’s joke was that his PLP audience found it funny and laughed.

Nearly 29 years have passed since Francis’ demise and the PLP or the Pindling estate has yet to issue an official apology for the uncalled for persecution the PLP had inflicted upon Francis and the cruel joke Pindling publicly uttered against the man.

Pindling had an opportunity to do so on July 7, 1997, when he gave his final address to Parliament before his retirement from frontline politics.

He did praise Francis along with many other former parliamentarians who have deceased as nation builders. But that was the extent of it. He said nothing about his government blocking Francis’ efforts to gain employment at the College of The Bahamas.

He said nothing about the PLP placing a silent economic embargo on Francis at a time when he needed work to support his family.

Bear in mind that Pindling was taught at Eastern Junior and Western Junior schools by Merle Seymour in grades three and four in the 1940s.

Why is this bit of information important? Because a young teacher at Western Junior by the name of Carlton Francis would eventually marry Merle Seymour.

Also bear in mind that Francis stood firmly with Pindling on Black Tuesday, April 27, 1965, and in the 1963 attempted coup in which a group of PLPs tried persuading the latter to resign as PLP leader.

Francis also stood firmly with Pindling after Paul Adderley, Spurgeon Bethel and Orville Turnquest rebelled against the PLP by returning to Parliament in 1965 even though the party was in the midst of a boycott of the House in protest against the UBP’s abuse of power.

All three PLP dissenters felt Pindling’s wrath when they were given a two-year suspension from the PLP.

They were also excluded from the PLP’s 1965 United Nation’s mission. In stark contrast to the three dissenters, Francis was loyal to Pindling from his succession to PLP leadership in 1956 to 1973, the year their relationship became estranged. The 1973 estrangement of Pindling and Francis would go on to cause untold hardship to the latter and his family.

What Pindling did to Francis was by no stretch of the imagination unique, however. There were perhaps thousands of other Bahamians whose lives were left ruined in the wake of the PLP’s destructive path between 1967 and 1992.

Making matters worst is the PLP’s refusal to admit to the wrongdoings it did against many of its rivals and dissenters. The party harmed many families between 1967 and 1992, but today act as if nothing ever happened.

And even when ironclad evidence is produced to prove that the party engaged in widespread political victimisation, its spin doctors and history revisionists have the temerity to airbrush the PLP’s dark history.

Ironically, as the PM Christie eulogised Earl Francis, his administration may already be in the process of setting up the structure and framework for the eventual legalisation of the web shop industry.

Tourism Minister Obie Wilchcombe announced in early March of this year that the PLP will regularise and tax web shop gaming by July 1, 2014.

Carlton Francis, as a Baptist preacher in his own right, opposed gambling in all its forms. Carlton Francis locked horns with Pindling, AD Hanna and the PLP government in 1973 over their decision to form an alliance with the foreign casino owners and to expand and nationalise casino gambling.

One of the major planks of the PLP’s campaign platform leading up to the January 10, 1967 general election was to undo the UBP’s alleged plan to expand casino gambling.

This anti-gambling message coupled with Sir Randol Fawkes’ and Alvin Braynen’s decision to join the PLP led to majority rule, after the initial election results saw the PLP and UBP locked in a stalemate with 18 seats apiece.

At the time Pindling forced Francis to resign, he had already been demoted to minister of education and development from the important portfolio of finance minister – a post he was given in the first Pindling Cabinet in 1967.

By all accounts, Francis was the most educated and brightest member in the PLP Cabinet and would have been a better PM than Pindling. He received his tertiary education from the University of the West Indies, Edinburgh University and St. Andrew’s University in Scotland.

PLP MP Renward Wells seems to be one of the few lawmakers eager to put together a committee to probe the sale of BTC to Cable and Wireless Communications in 2011.

Wells is a Johnny-come-lately PLP politician who obviously has plenty of idle time on his hand. Rather than push for a meaningless probe into the BTC sale, Wells and the PLP should form a select committee which would be tasked with examining the pain and misery their PLP predecessors inflicted on their political rivals in the late sixties and throughout the decades of the seventies and eighties.

The PLP should follow the example of the South African government which formed the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1995 in order to probe the many human rights abuses inflicted upon black South Africans by the White Apartheid administration and to bring healing and closure to the thousands of black families who were traumatised.

Wells should also push for the PLP to issue a public and official apology to the Francis family for the shoddy manner in which Carlton Francis was treated by the PLP and Pindling. This is a wrong that the PLP must right.

THE WHISTLEBLOWER

Nassau,

April 21, 2014.