EDITOR, the Tribune.
Life is about cause and effect. If you plant corn, it follows that you ought to pray for rain.
If you are a patriotic Bahamian who wants Perry Christie to succeed so that the country succeeds, then you ought to pray for Hubert Ingraham to return to the leadership of the official opposition.
Ingraham will bring out the best in Christie. Christie will “up his game” if he has to go head-to-head with Ingraham again. No more free passes, the Prime Minister will be compelled to show why he should be given another five-year term.
We voters will get a chance to choose, something we have been denied with the current leader of the opposition. He cannot close the deal with the Bahamian people if he had another ten years to try.
The bookies like to handicap races and if they took odds on the next election they would give Dr Hubert Minnis long odds, worse than 100-1. This has to be disturbing to those FNMs looking for a horse to ride back into power.
The most vital political skill of any leader is the ability to win elections. Only three men can claim this skill. One has been called to glory, one is the current Prime Minister and the other has left the arena. He must be persuaded to return if Christie is to be all that he can be.
Winning isn’t just the most important issue, it’s the only reason to enter the race. Ingraham is the FNM’s best chance to win just as Christie is the PLP’s best chance to win in 2017.
Both have a record to run on. Christie’s has come up short. Ingraham was a good prime minister. His reforms helped usher in a new Bahamas. His reputation has been damaged not for lying or tiefing or being unethical, corrupt, lazy or shallow. Rather he is remembered for not delivering a key infrastructure on time – the roads.
Mr Ingraham needs to atone for the mistakes of the bumbling bureaucrats who laboured at his direction on the big dig-up. Atoning by retiring is not good enough. He needs to get back in the game. The Family Islands need roads too. The harbours are a disgrace, water is unreliable and BEC say where you put me.
Christie is a realist. He looks at the FNM bench and sees no need to change his style or to finally develop a strategy for anything. If Ingraham came back Christie will straighten up and fly right.
If he comes to the House with one hair out of place Ingraham will eat him alive. Love these two dinosaurs or hate them, they are not extinct yet. Ingraham vs Christie 3.0 is what political junkies live for and sadly, what the Bahamas surely needs right now.
Statecraft and statesmanship should compel Mr Ingraham back into the arena, not what Frank Watson may or may not think.
D J P
Nassau,
June 8, 2015.
Comments
banker 8 years, 10 months ago
Ingraham has lost his mojo, because his experience has taught him that the majority of the Bahamian electorate are as enlightened as a bunch of slugs. They will sell their vote, re-elect thugs and tiefs, and tolerate the smelly bottom-feeders if they just get a little crumb that falls from the table.
Ingraham knew what to do. He tried to diversify the economy with his Third Pillar, eCommerce manifesto for the Bahamas. He tried to introduce constitutional equality for women and the PLP effectively campaigned against him by inflaming the sheeple and slugs with a dribble of filthy lucre and high-sounding words that they did not understand. He moved heaven and earth with innovative legislation to remove the OECD blacklisting. He knew that the tax haven concept was dying.
When Ingraham lost the referendum and the election, he knew that he had to lower his agenda to accommodate the lowest common denominator, and that is how he played his last term.
If the Bahamas ultimately survives, and gets to a better place than the banana republic it is, then history will be a harsh judge of the PLP. Enlightened Bahamians will rename the airport, own up to the criminal history of successive PLP governments and the names so revered by odious PLP government of today, will be consigned to slime from which they arose.
There is enough external evidence for the historians to counteract the lies and propaganda of the PLP, and perhaps when truth is no longer a savage prisoner and victim of Bahamian life, history will recognise that Hubert Alexander Ingraham has been the finest prime minister that the Bahamas has had to this date. Perry Christie will be seen as the inferior human being that he is.
cmiller 8 years, 10 months ago
Neither Christie nor Ingraham needs to run for prime minister again, they are both well past their expiry date. Because of social media, which will expose and reveal wrongdoing and secrets in a way that has never happened before, both of these dinosaurs will have problems adjusting to the bright light shining on everything they want hidden. Politics has taken a new turn, which their generation cannot handle.
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