The Tribune

By NATARIO McKENZIE

Tribune Business Reporter

nmckenzie@tribunemedia.net

An architect said yesterday that while the National Development Plan’s (NDP) ‘State of the Nation’ report has outlined the Bahamas’ current condition, the “great opportunity” lies in fixing the issues it identifies.

    Michael Diggiss, principal of Michael Diggiss & Associates, while addressing the Bahamas Society of Engineers (BSE) monthly luncheon, said: “I think we have tried to do an honest critique of where we are as a people. The report is an attempt to say what is our current condition. One of the struggles I have with the report is that  it doesn’t tell us why those conditions exist and how do we fix them. That’s where the great opportunity lies.”

    Mr Diggiss added: We don’t do enough studies on what our conditions are. We are grossly underpopulated. The problem is that our population is not what it needs to be. We have too many young people who are uneducated.

“You have a lot of uneducated young people, and a lot of them who are educated abroad are not coming back home. That is a huge problem for this country. We have to do something to correct that. I think we often get caught up in the mythology that there is not enough work to do. The biggest component of labour that comes into this country is manual labour, and we have all of these young people who are out of work.”

    Mr Diggiss also took issue with the seemingly limited attention given to the construction industry in the State of the Nation Report.

“When I looked at the document there is no one from the engineering and architectural  industry that is actually part of the make-up of the council or committee,” he said.

“I read the document and construction is one paragraph, that’s it. In the 79 pages there’s one paragraph in the entire document that speaks to construction.”