The Tribune

EDITOR, The Tribune.

A wise person once told me that if you are to understand the purpose of a thing you have to pay attention to the results, good or bad, positive or negative, and if you are really looking you will see.

This present administration has been caught in a state of “complicitous duplicity” that is boggling the mind of even the die-hard PLP supporters and recent remarks by the Attorney General about the Prime Minister telling us what we need to know about Baha Mar may be an indication of how stupid she thinks the Bahamian people are.

Is she planning on living in this country whenever she retires? Baha Mar is a dead issue, we do not want to know about Baha Mar.

We want to know what concessions have been given to the Chinese Government now that they have this administration between a rock and a hard place. This recent “news conference” may have been the biggest lie so far.

Raymond Winder says that the agreement is being sealed for commercial reasons, something about finding a buyer. He should know by now that the Chinese do not sell property.

Even Foreign direct businesses that want to invest in China cannot own property, they can only pay for the use of the land. This is similar to what the Chinese government did when they leased Hong Kong to the British for 99 years.

This government needs to wake up and start talking. They are not even telling us that the “Pointe” project is going to be almost four times as large as the present structure we are seeing and that that it may march past Junkanoo Beach. We need to hold the Chinese to the rules that they impose on their own people and not allow them to own any major real-estate in The Bahamas; they are using “Western” business rules to gain unfair advantage over our economy, and securing a foothold off the eastern seaboard of the United States that may put us in the middle of a geo-political skirmish in the years to come. 

I am surprised that none of our leaders have brought up the “coughing and sneezing” relationship that we have with the Americans next door and the fact that more than 70 per cent of our GDP is dependent on  a particular movement of traffic. This government can preach about sovereignty all it wants, but we have to realise how long it takes for a shipping container to arrive in this country. The future of this nation may be a cough and a sneeze away; and the penchant of our politicians to continually bite the hand that feeds them is not helping us at all.

The only purpose this “secrecy” can facilitate is that of giving the Chinese the time they need to get their hands on the concessions they have gotten from the Christie administration. We may have to march on Baha Mar as a people, march on Parliament or close this nation down if that is what it is going to take to make the Attorney General and the Cabinet tell us what is going on, because it is obvious that Percival Gladstone Christie is not running this show.

EDWARD HUTCHESON

Nassau,

August 25, 2016.