The Tribune

EDITOR, The Tribune.

It is true that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Twenty-six years ago, a young Hubert Ingraham exposed the tendency in the Progressive Liberal Party to govern on the fly. Making his contribution to the Annual Budget debate in 1987, he is reported to have said words to the following effect:

“For years, the Majority Party has only presented a Budget to Parliament to meet the constitutional requirement to do so. It has never, in my view, been rated any higher than that by this government. It spends money which is not budgeted and neglects to spend money which is budgeted. It borrows money for projects which it says it’s going to do and spends the money but does not do the projects; and it comes around the next year – promises the projects again, borrows the money again and does not do it.

“It feels absolutely free to change its priorities, create new ones in the middle of the year, abandon some others, add new ones during the course of the year and generally act as though the Budget does not exist. The leadership of the Majority Party is very skillful at doing what he does best, that is, operate from day to day, month to month in an unprincipled and unplanned fashion. It simply cannot decide what it wants to do for the next 12 months and do it. It depends on how the wind is blowing; its feeling and instincts.”

If Mr Ingraham were in Parliament today, he would not have to find new sentences to describe the farce that the now Leader of the Majority Party brought to the House of Assembly as its mid-year budget.

Because the new Financial and Administration Audit Act requires the Government to make a budget statement mid-year to provide the House of Assembly with an accounting of how the Government is managing its annual budget, the Minister of Finance made a budget statement. Simply put, the Minister of Finance met the legal requirement of the law.

Thereafter, the statement was a fiction. The Minister told Parliament that Government revenues were up some $36 million over the same period in the previous year. They are not. The statistics tabled by the Minister show that government revenues are down by more than $5 million and down significantly – by 27 per cent in the sector commonly called the engine of the Bahamian economy – tourism!

The Minister maintains that the economy has turned around and the economy is looking up. The truth is that when the PLP came to office in May 2012 unemployment stood at 14.7 per cent. Today, after two years of mismanagement of the economy unemployment stands at 15.4 per cent and daily we read of more jobs lost in the economy – most recently in the well paid financial services sector.

The Minister of Finance did not use his mid-year budget statement to explain how monies budgeted for urban renewal over two budget periods – 2012-2013 and 2013-2014 have been expended or are being expended.

The overgrown lots cleared during its first year in office are once again overgrown with no sight of a regular programme to keep the areas clean or safe. The DPM’s promise to bring greater transparency to the award of contracts for cleaning and maintaining road verges and open green spaces remains another unfulfilled promise.

The dramatic decline in crime that the PLP promised would result with the implementation of Urban Renewal 2.0 programmes is a figment of the imaginations of the prime minister, the minister of national security and the commissioner of police.

Last year, the unofficial count for unlawful killings was upward of 120.

Just into the second week of March 2014, the murder count stands at 23 and there have been two suicides. The number of survivors of other shooting and stabbing incidents also continues to climb though neither the police nor the Ministry of National Security provide the public with information on that count.

The mid-year budget revealed that both the Prime Minister and the Minister of Foreign Affairs have overspent the budgeted sums for their official overseas travel but neither shows any inclination to reign in their extravagant world travels. Both are today at intercessional meetings of Caricom in St Vincent. And the prime minister has yet to provide the promised accounting for his overseas jaunt to Rome and London last year – two of Europe’s most expensive cities.

The electorate was promised a constitutional referendum to remove the last vestiges of discrimination against women from our Constitution. Instead, we got an expensive public opinion poll (costing somewhere between $1.5 and $5 million) on regulating gaming. And, because the results of the poll did not match the Government’s desires, the poll’s results are being ignored and disregarded.

We were promised tax reform. Instead of reform, VAT is being thrust down our throats by a money-hungry political leadership which did not bother to vet political friends being engaged to manage the process. The result is that the Bahamian people are paying the salary for a tax cheat whose job it is to help the Government extract still higher taxes from tax paying, honest citizens.

Really, this PLP Government is a true successor to the 1987 government led by Sir Lynden. It’s all about them, their feelings and their instincts; to hell with planning and good governance.

KIRKLAND TURNER

Nassau,

March 10, 2014