The Tribune

By FREDERICK SMITH, QC

THREE successive administrations from 1992 have promised to give us Freedom of Information. It all started with the Delivery Boy’s promise to bring us “Government In The Sunshine” to provide us with the tools to monitor the behaviour of public officials – our employees – and determine whether their performance is good enough, whether they have been acting in the interests of the public and not for their own benefit, that of their friends, relatives or lovers.

So far, all of these governments have betrayed our trust and failed miserably to deliver on their pledge. The first two never even tried. After gaining office based on empty promises and false pretences, administrations led by Hubert Ingraham and Perry Christie simply laughed in our faces.

Brazenly defying the will of the public, these administrations carried on operating in secret, behind closed doors, acting in our name and using our money however they wanted while looking with disdain upon the Bahamian people.

Ingraham’s FNM passed a Freedom of Information Act but never brought it into effect, allowing the PLP to delay and eventually scrap the law. Perry Christie and his cohorts claimed their intention was to replace it with a better version, but quite obviously, this never happened.

Instead, FOIA was made the responsibility of former Minister of Education Jerome Fitzgerald, whose mafia-style “you touch one, you touch all” attitude to protecting his associates ensured that the government would never be exposed to public scrutiny on his watch.

Having thus secured its freedom from accountability, the Christie administration proceeded to unleash upon a startled and dismayed public such a plague of high-profile failures, laughable shams and disastrous shady deals as had never been seen before. Many of these disasters still linger in the public imagination as infamous symbols of government incompetence, waste and corruption.

Take the BAMSI fiasco. A part of a multimillion dollar building funded with public money burns down. It turns out that the contractor never secured insurance, even though this was a requirement. It also turns out that he is a close friend of the PLP government – a Stalwart Councillor of the party no less.

How did this individual, of all people, get that contract? Was there any bidding process at all? In the days following the fire, the government insisted that the building was adequately covered, only for it to be later revealed that the insurance company listed on the paperwork didn’t actually exist. Did our elected officials lie to us, or were they duped by the contractor as well? We will probably never know. Meanwhile, the public had to foot the $3m bill.

Also on Perry Christie’s watch, and while the FOIA was suspended indefinitely for “improvements”, the public was very nearly made to spend $600m on a waste-to-energy facility, to be run by highly questionable foreign individuals with no apparent experience in the field. The public still has no idea how the Stellar Waste to Energy scandal came about, yet the MP who signed the letter of intent on behalf of the PLP has somehow been made a cabinet minister by the FNM, without ever giving an adequate explanation.

Meanwhile as a result of continued secrecy, incompetence and shifty dealing, the New Providence Landfill - ‘The Dump’ – remains to this day an environmental disaster zone and a critical health risk to everyone who lives in the surrounding area.

What about the Rubis gas spill? The government of the Bahamas knew for almost two years that a fuel station had leaked tens of thousands of gallons of gasoline into the ground, polluting the water supply, polluting the air and placing thousands of people at grave, grave risk. Many became sick, some died. The effects of gasoline poisoning can take years to show themselves. No doubt the legacy of this disaster will continue to haunt the community of Marathon for decades to come.

The decision to keep this critical danger a secret – even from the victims themselves – was made at the top levels of government, by Cabinet ministers who knew the public would never be able to hold them accountable for this complete travesty of justice. Who made the decision? Why did they put so many people’s lives at risk? Who stood to benefit? Once again, we will probably never know.

What did the PLP use their illegal spy machine, the National Intelligence Agency, to do? Who did they spy on – was it the FNM politicians? Dissident members of their own party? Was it you, or me? Why do both governments desperately want this Spy Act, that will basically allow them to intrude on the privacy of anyone they wish? What do they know that we don’t? Again, we will probably never know. One thing we do know, is that having passed the Bill, their dream of being able to eavesdrop on our lives at will has finally become a reality; meanwhile, our desire to know what they are up to remains a distant hope.

Why did the PLP try to neuter a progressive piece of legislation called the Planning and Subdivisions Act? Most Bahamians don’t know that the former government sought to:

• do away with public consultation on projects that would affect communities;

• make environmental safeguards for development optional;

• make it easier for foreign developers to steal public land;

• make it possible to build low cost housing next to garbage dumps, and schools next to dangerous power plants.

Why? We will never know for sure, but presumably it had something to do with the desire of politicians to reward the foreign unregulated developers and environmental abusers who fund their political campaigns. In fact, the lack of Freedom of Information is the main reason why such shady characters are able to secretly fund political parties in the first place. The reason why, after an election, you never really know who your leaders are working for.

Under the last PLP, Peter Nygard was able to corrupt an entire government, able to destroy Crown Land without any response from the authorities, able to threaten and intimidate people, organise inflammatory and racist hate rallies, all with total impunity.

The only reason the public even knows that Nygard bought Christie’s government is that he told us so himself. The fashion designer turned political sugar-daddy published a video bragging that he ‘took back’ the Bahamas and showed PLP ministers being wined and dined at his home. But how can you know that this new FNM government is not in the pocket of some other foreigner? The answer is, you can’t. Not really. Not without campaign finance transparency.

This new FNM, of course, also promised us Freedom of Information. But instead we got Oban. We got a project that is so regressive and backward looking, so environmentally disastrous, so clumsy and ham-fisted, so shady and underhanded that it makes the Stellar fiasco look like a great deal.

We also got the announcement of a Liquefied Natural Gas plant at Clifton Pier, one of the most polluted and toxic sites in the Bahamas, where over the years hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil have spilled into the ground and water unchecked.

Both this government and the last promised to clean up Clifton. Instead, the FNM is building yet another industrial plant on this dangerous, poison-soaked site. We know there were alternative proposals for other locations for an LNG plant. Were these given a fair shot? Was the bidding process open and transparent? Of course not.

Successive governments promised to be frugal with our money. Instead, the PLP created ‘Bahamas Resolve’, an initiative that amounted to using public funds to pay off $100 million in toxic Bank of the Bahamas loans, given to individuals who never bothered paying it back. Who were these individuals? Leaked documents pointed to several people with close ties to the Christie administration but in all likelihood, the full list will never be known and they will be off the hook forever. Now, the FNM has asked for an additional $100m to pour into the black hole that is Resolve.

What I have described is not what governance is supposed to look like in a democracy. What is happening in secret – what has been happening for decades – amounts to an unofficial dictatorship of the executive branch of government, that has hijacked our democratic institutions and trampled upon our sovereignty. It amounts to a small group of individuals at the top of each party occasionally swapping power with each other, then continuing to do as they please with the country, while the public is left increasingly out of the loop.

The FNM say Freedom of Information is coming now. We shall see. But in the wake of betrayal after betrayal, I would advise my fellow Bahamians not to get their hopes up. We have been here too many times before. This government has followed its predecessors in preferring to act behind a cloak of secrecy instead of in the sunshine. It would be unwise to suddenly believe that they have been converted into ‘friends of transparency’.

That is why, regardless of personal circumstances or political persuasion, we must all come together and continue to demand – as vocally and forcefully as we possibly can – that we have a right to know what is being done in our name. That we have a right to demand that our government live up to its promise and give us transparency and accountability. A right to demand that they stop pulling the wool over our eyes, stop lying to us, and give us Freedom of Information immediately.