The Tribune

IT WOULD seem these days that one is damned if they do, damned if they don’t. Everyone seems to be crowing from different sides of their mouth.

A week ago, former State Minister for Legal Affairs Damian Gomez wanted to know if under the Minnis-led FNM government there had been a policy shift in the sale of land to foreigners.

It was not known, he said, whether Bahamian cays would now be leased instead of sold.

“If these are uninhabited cays, what is the significance of keeping it uninhabited? Why is that such a big deal? They are changing the policy so why do they feel motivated to do this? When cays have been sold, in most cases the purchasers have developed the cay and created employment. There is that growth to the economy that you are now saying you are ending. That’s irrational.

“It doesn’t seem to be a scientific approach he’s taken. In general they seem to have a knee jerk approach to their activities. If I were him I would have given an historical overview of what was obtained from how many purchases in a particular year so the public would at least have an idea about the significance to the public treasury of abandoning that project and adopting a different one,” Mr Gomez said.

For the sake of Mr Gomez, we shall take a look at the position taken on this matter by his PLP party in 2002-2007.

For background, let’s flashback to July 22, 2009 when then FNM prime minister Hubert Ingraham – dealing with the same question – remarked that the Leader of the Opposition – at the time Mr Perry Christie – “seeks to have it both ways.”

“First he blames my Government for having repealed the Immovable Properties Act, which he claims was put in place to protect Bahamian land from unlimited sale to foreigners and replacing it with the International Persons Landholding Act. This action he claims facilitated the rapid sale of Bahamian owned land to foreigners,” Mr Ingraham told the House.

But, having condemned the Ingraham government for introducing a law that he claimed sold Bahamian land to foreigners to the detriment of Bahamians, Mr Christie on again becoming prime minister (2002-2007) admitted that his PLP government did not change the law that he had condemned because “in the furtherance of our effort (PLP) to drive economic growth we elected not to change the law.”

That’s certainly what one calls trying to eat one’s cake and have it too.

“Now, out of office again,” Mr Ingraham pointed out on the floor of the House in 2009, the PLP “are again claiming it was a terrible law enacted by us that caused them to do.”

Mr Ingraham said that Mr Christie at that time claimed that “the record will reflect that an enormous amount of Bahamian land throughout The Bahamas was sold to foreigners under this process (that is as a result of the adoption of the International Persons Landholding Act) with the negative impact of driving up the price of land.”

“If truth be spoken, the record shows no such thing,” Mr Ingraham told the House.

“What the record shows is that between 1993 and 2002 under my Government’s administration as much as one half of all sales of land to foreigners in The Bahamas was between foreigners – a foreign owner who had bought land in The Bahamas before the FNM came to office, selling to a new foreign buyer.

“Indeed, on the watch of members opposite, reports made by them to this Honourable House claimed that their administration had approved the sale of more land to international persons in less than a single term than was sold in two terms under my administration.

“As to the rising cost of land, I believe the record will show that the enactment of the Immovable Properties Act (PLP) drove the real estate sector in The Bahamas into serious decline with plummeting land prices and a stagnation of development.

“The enactment of the International Person’s Landholding Act (FNM) stopped that downward spiral and turned the real estate sector around. The Act facilitated many foreign land owners in The Bahamas in moving forward with long postponed developments on land already owned by them.”

In the House last week Dr Minnis said that in addition to ceasing the sale of Crown land to private people, his government will “preserve the seabed for the Crown, approving only leases of it.”

The government, he said, “will retain for the Crown a Crown reserve between ocean/sea, front/inland lake property, granted for private development where un-alienated Crown land exists at the seashore, to preserve windows to the sea and open green and beach front spaces for the enjoyment of the public.”

He also said the government will “regularise long-term occupation of Crown land developed or cultivated by individual Bahamians and/or families at concessionary rates” and make Crown land available to Bahamian nationals for residential, commercial and touristic development, particularly in the Family Islands.”

Former Attorney General Alfred Sears commended the prime minister for his commitment to increased transparency in dealing with Crown Land, but strongly recommended that Dr Minnis divest himself in his position as prime minister as being also the minister responsible for Crown land. Mr Sears believed that to regain public trust all Crown land should come under a public authority guided by published policies from cabinet after consultation with civil society and an annual report of the lease and transfer of all Crown land should be gazetted and disclosed in an annual report to the House of Assembly.