The Tribune

WHEN Prime Minister Dr Hubert A Minnis goes on the road this week to sell the budget, there is one tool in his doctor’s kit that he should be prepared to use – a strong dose of the often-overlooked costs of funding hurricane mitigation, recovery and rebuilding.

The problem with talking about hurricanes when the sun is shining is that a lack of urgency lends itself to that great Bahamian character trait of procrastination perfected. The other challenge in calling attention to funding for natural disaster mitigation and recovery is that the subject has no sex appeal. When the coast is clear, mitigation is not romantic. It is not glamorous like opening a new Bahamas consulate in Miami or exciting like a Bahamian teen, Deandre Ayton, being the number one overall NBA draft pick and landing with the Phoenix Suns.

But if the Prime Minister wants to hit home with the budget, he has to go beyond the need to curtail debt service – the interest we pay on the money successive governments have been borrowing – and include the high costs of recovery and rebuilding from hurricanes. With the exception of government payroll and associated expenses like pensions, disaster relief, recovery and rebuilding have become the single largest expense of the government. The Bahamas is not alone. Disaster relief and recovery are becoming the heaviest burden on nearly every government in the hurricane or natural disaster belt. The US spent over $300bn on national disasters in 2016.

Dr Minnis speaks about being a doctor, treating The Bahamas as a patient, wanting to heal what ails the unhealthy state of the country’s financial affairs. As the medical practitioner turned prime minister makes his rounds to the Family Islands this week, he needs to include disaster prevention and recovery funding in his prescriptive arsenal. Overlooking the reality of costs of disaster mitigation, preparedness and recovery could cause untold damage to the “patient” already suffering from a shaky financial grounding.

Shortly after the FNM came to power in May of 2017, Works Minister Desmond Bannister issued a strong wake-up call in a Meet the Ministers presentation hosted by the Bahamas Chamber of Commerce and Employers Confederation. “What we have done in the past will not allow us to sustain ourselves in the future,” he said. Building on low-lying shore lines, allowing destruction of coral reefs that protect the coast by breaking the power of wave action and slowing the rush of water, constructing buildings without hurricane clips, or failing to meet the tough standards of today’s building code all increase risk and potential for loss. According to Bannister, a house built more than ten years ago is unlikely to meet today’s building code.

The Bahamas has spent some $2.5bn between 1980 and 2010 on hurricane and disaster recovery. Mr Bannister predicted that cost would continue to increase and could rise to $.5bn a year over the next ten years. The cost to rebuild homes in South Beach following Hurricane Matthew in 2017 has been estimated to range from $460m to $740m. The higher figure would make the cost to rebuild in just one community of New Providence even greater than government payroll.

As the leader of this nation tries to get the public to understand and appreciate the bitter pill of paying for decades of overspending and over borrowing, the need to include the cost of recovery and rebuilding needs to be added to the prescription along with measures to mitigate against disaster prior to storms. We have seen the devastation of hurricanes on nearly every island and the ongoing impact of that destruction on places like Ragged Island where life after Irma, a category 5 hurricane that destroyed nearly everything on the small isle, left the once-proud isle virtually uninhabitable.

Neither the government nor the public has demanded that full attention be focused on the threat of hurricanes and what this country must do to protect itself.

Yet nothing is more critical to the endurance and survival of The Bahamas than ensuring we are building to a standard that will allow the country to continue on a path of life and growth for all its citizens and residents than being ready for what Nature dishes out. We have allowed developments like that in Bimini to destroy coral reefs that are Nature’s barrier to the shoreline. Only in Grand Bahama where one man’s generosity has helped pay for 15,000 children to learn to swim have we taken the need to be able to swim to survive seriously enough. Every child in The Bahamas should be taught how to swim.

With The Bahamas in the direct path of impact from climate change which is expected to produce warmer waters and rising sea levels, generating even more powerful storms, the people of The Bahamas have a very bitter pill to swallow if we do not take strong measures to mitigate against potential damage before the floods and winds rob us of more of our land and lifestyle. If Dr Minnis wants us to swallow a pill for debt and a healthier financial picture, he should use this time to add the more important pill for our very survival.