The Tribune

EDITOR, The Tribune.

Patriotic Bahamians are invited to join a Junkanoo rush-out at the Lynden Pindling International Airport to bid a native farewell to the letter writer who uses the signature “The Ghost of Junkanoo Future”.

The Ghost went on a bigoted, racist tirade puking his prejudiced and white supremacist bile all over the country that has given him refuge these last 25 years, or so he says.

Despite his obvious deep-seated hatred of black people, he still decided to set up shop here in 1993. Why? Could it be that just like the early colonialists and missionaries who went into places inhabited by richly pigmented people, he thought he could teach us some sense and show us the white (sorry, the right) way to behave and run a country?

There is so much to unpack in his contemptuous valise that one hardly knows where to start. Let him keep his obdurate opinions and let’s focus instead on his maligning of black people, his lies and his slander of our good name.

To stay here for 25 years foretells a success story, not the abject failure The Ghost describes. Even the Holy Ghost would have left this country long time ago if it was as haunted as he described. So, we can assume that some supernatural force made him endure this Bahamian indignity. Could it be that he made pots of money off the backs of us insolent D-grade Bahamians?

We are grateful for the vast majority of our foreign investors, of course, but one can only imagine the nightmare of working for The Ghost. His workplace must be as peachy as it must have been for the slaves who had the sheer pleasure and honour of toiling on plantations.

Will someone please tell The Ghost that Massa Day Done!

Nothing that we have done in our Bahamian project since independence has been successful, according to The Ghost, save of course for those loyalists on Abaco who wanted to dismember themselves from our Bahamian body politic and remain a part of a United Kingdom so desperate to jettison its colonial past that they wanted nothing to do with a handful of disruptors on Abaco.

In a stunning contradiction, The Ghost claims that Abaco is the most successful part of the Bahamas. Could it be that the policies and laws passed by the descendants of slaves sitting in the parliament in Nassau made them richer than any mandarin in Whitehall back in London ever could?

You can rest assured that he credits their success only to their skin colour and not to the fact that they are equal members of our Bahamian family.

The rest of our burger flipping compatriots must find The Ghost a joke. The casuarina trees that he claims infest our shores once proved so enticing to the location scouts for the James Bond movie series that they decided to feature them in the backdrop for their movie “Thunderball” that was filmed in this infested swamp and received global acclaim.

The Ghost should have learned by now that we are conspicuous consumers and we spread our ill-gotten gains around the malls and pleasure palaces of South Florida. No Swiss bank account is good enough for our stolen money. That was the modus operandi of the white Bay Street Boys, people who, though corrupt, were Bahamians first and would have taken The Ghost to the cleaners before showing him the door.

The Bahamas did not produce any talent worthy of impressing the judges of the Grammys, except maybe for Baha Men who won one or Johnny Kemp who was nominated for one. The world never swooned over our track and field stars and never heard of Tommy Robinson or Sir Durward Knowles, much less the Golden Girls. On a per capita basis we produce more high level medal winners in sports than most countries on the planet.

Elisha Obed did not win a world boxing championship in Paris in 1975 or maybe he did and just lied about being one of us. The Smithsonian did not get excited by the guitar mastery of Joe Spence. And nobody ever flew here just to hear Blind Blake sing or to watch Amos Ferguson paint.

And there’s that a fable about Bert Williams performing at Buckingham Palace many years ago. And the US media continues to spread the lie that Deandre Ayton was just the number one pick in the National Basketball Association draft.

The Ghost refused to acknowledge that our original roads and infrastructure were designed and built by his white British friends and are somewhat reflective of the degraded conditions experienced even today on many country lanes in the UK.

Never mind also that Nassau and Freeport boast some of the best roads in the entire Caribbean or that we are so adept at hurricane recovery that we are now able to project our hurricane assistance 1,200 miles away to help our brothers in the Caribbean.

The Ghost is loose with a number of facts, like claiming that we will be thrown out of the WTO. As an astute businessman he should know that we have been observers at the WTO since 2001 and that the five-year timetable he references is when we had to begin negotiating joining the organization, which we did. It took Russia 19 years to fully join and China took 15 years and five months. And they are global trading players.

The Ghost wants our prison relocated to an isolated cay without any consideration given to the costs and the hardship involved in getting those detained to and from courts in Nassau for hearings, in getting families to visit them and in getting workers and guards to and fro – a security and logistical nightmare. With his mentality, no wonder the idea of another Devil’s Island appeals to him.

Even Alcatraz Prison smack in the middle of San Francisco Bay couldn’t make it work but somehow black people are to blame because we can’t either. The affront made to our justice system is reprehensible and unworthy of even this bigot.

All of us cuss the unfamiliarity that many of our jitney drivers have of the road code, but few of us would say the large fleets of relatively new mini-buses that ply the roads are unserviceable.

The Ghosts chides us for not having banks on every Family Island and implies it is the fault of black people. This disregards a study done in the US which found that in the last 30 years half of all the banks in America have closed and in some rural areas banks have vanished. Over there it’s the socio-economic conditions that are blamed for bank closings. Here The Ghost blames black people.

Bahamasair has had its challenges but lately they have right-sized the ship and their reliability record is improving, so much so that their General Manager was elected to a leadership position in the trade association that speaks for all airlines in Latin America and the Caribbean.

We can all agree with The Ghost that we are not Singapore or Qatar. We have neither oil like Qatar nor, like Singapore, the geo-political advantages of being a democracy in a region run by socialists, communists and authoritarians. Who wouldn’t want to run their Asian business interests from there?

The Ghost lists Antigua (but leaves off Barbuda) alongside Turks and Caicos, the Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands as examples of economic virtue. Turks was so corrupt that the Brits had to install a white governor from the UK (which he likes), and Cayman had to kick out their premier. Antigua has many more fiscal challenges than we do and are given to selling citizenship to help make ends meet.

The Ghosts’ laundry list of ills drones on and in a shocking statement claims that there is not one competent soul amongst us who can fix our problems. Never mind that 91,000 Bahamians voted to give Hubert Minnis that job last year and that he is getting on with it.

The Ghost has no evidence that we would be better off had we eschewed independence and remained a colony.

We have no crystal ball to point the way but the day the Ghost packs his Georgie bundle and leaves town, all of us Bahamians will be much better off.

Now that’s a ghost move that we can all dance too.

THE GRADUATE

Nassau,

June 27, 2018