The Tribune

EDITOR, The Tribune.

THE PLP’s 2016 campaign slogan Forward Together Bahamians reminds me of its 2012 Believe in Bahamians slogan. The 2012 campaign propaganda helped to etch in the minds of angry Bahamians that the Free National Movement was, derisively speaking, the Foreign National Movement.

PLPs were spreading the narrative that then PM Hubert Ingraham was selling out the country to the Chinese. Xenophobic Bahamians bought this untruth wholesale and voted en mass against the FNM.

With a few weeks before the May 10 general election, it can be successfully argued that the PLP has been the most pro-foreign government in our nation’s history. The Bahamas, like any other developing country, needs foreign direct investments in order to achieve sustainable economic growth. The PLP has bent over backwards to accommodate the Chinese and Canadian Peter Nygard.

The PLP’s 2012 campaign should have been “Believe OJIBN, Min a Canadian. Believe in Chinese. Believe in web shop operatives.” Nygard is so important to these people that they steamrolled his pet initiative stem cells legislation through Parliament. Nygard’s impunity is so ubiquitous and astounding that he, along with some PLP hangers-on, marched into the PLP stronghold of Bain Town in broad daylight to confront the Rev CB Moss, a former PLP senator.

If the PLP could treat their own like this, I shudder to think what they would do to an FNM. Adding injury to insult was a video that went viral with the Canadian talking about my PM in the most reviling manner. No one from the PLP thought it was worthwhile to reprimand Nygard.

If that was a Bahamian of the lower socio-economic group or an ordinary FNM, he or she would have been haunted down like an animal and incarcerated at Fox Hill Prison.

When Baha Mar developer Sarkis Izmirlian publicly disagreed with PM Perry Christie, Fred Mitchell gave him a tongue lashing along with a threat to have him deported out of The Bahamas. Yet he along with his Cabinet colleagues were close-mouthed regarding the vitriolic Nygard video. Whereas Izmirlian’s words were mild, Nygard’s were downright inimical. But we all know why no one from the Cabinet dared to ruffle the feathers of massa Nygard.

As for the web shop operatives, the PLP essentially told the masses to go to hell when it blatantly ignored the gaming referendum results in order to please the numbers people. There is the perception out there that the numbers people financed the PLP 2012 campaign. The move to legalise web shop gaming was allegedly a payback.

The PLP is so favorably disposed towards these people that they even went as far as nominating a candidate that the numbers people are alleged to be backing.

As for the Chinese, the PLP has ignored the cry of the black and white masses by refusing to unseal the Baha Mar court documents regarding the new deal to get the mega resort opened that they had allegedly  reached with Chow Tai Fook Enterprises Ltd’s CTF BM Holdings. The Bahamian people eagerly awaits the release of the Supreme Court documents this month, as has been promised by Attorney General Allyson Maynard-Gibson.

The Forward Together Bahamians slogan is really a plagiarism of former FNM MP Loretta Butler’s Forward Together 2016 slogan for her failed leadership bid of the FNM. PLP campaign strategists are running out of ideas it seems. No innovation. Why copycat the slogan of a failed former FNM MP? They cannot come back to the Bahamian people with that Believe in Bahamians campaign pitch because no sensible person will believe it, other than their sycophants.

I have noticed that one of their Forward Together television commercials featured new candidates.

It appears like a conscious effort to hide senior PLPs, with the aim of trying not to remind Bahamians of all that has gone wrong during this disastrous term, seeing that those senior PLPs have played a pivotal role in screwing up this country.

After what these people have done to this country over the past five years, I hope nobody is stupid enough to believe their myth about putting Bahamians first. Forward Together Numbers Boys. Forward Together Peter Nygard. Forward Together Chinese!

THE WHISTLEBLOWER

April 17, 2017.