The Tribune

EDITOR, The Tribune

As a trained and highly experienced former member of The Bahamas Bar, I do believe that I am qualified to opine on judicial matters locally and around the world. In countries where the government and its allies are in actual ‘control’ of the legal profession and the judiciary, you will find that the administration of justice is badly crippled or entirely non existent, to the profound detriment of the stability and viability of a nation. With your leave, my fellow Bahamians, et al, may I refer to the recent presidential elections in the so-called Democratic Republic of Congo.

Congo, as it is universally known, has been ruled by the Kabila family, through father and son, for decades after the father seized political and military power in a brutal coup. The then president was butchered and killed. Since then the judiciary in the Congo has been subject to manipulations of the highest order. In recent years the so-called Constitutional court’ ruled that Kabilia was entitled, under the constitution, to offer for re-election, despite a then current constitutional ban on such a move.

This same ‘Constitutional Court’ has now ruled that the candidate whom every observer said got the least votes in the just concluded presidential elections, is the duly elected president. That individual seems to be in ‘an understanding’ with outgoing Kabila. This is what happens when the local judiciary is actually controlled or seemed to be controlled by any government of the day, in any nation.

Right here at home, we have a judiciary, established as one of the three pillars of governance and a bulwark in our Constitution...The Bahamas Independence Order, 1973. This administration, through the Prime Minister, has seemed to be reluctant to fulfil its constitutional mandate...that of the substantive appointment of a Chief Justice. while there may be nothing sinister about this, the perception and actual hobbling of the judiciary are spin offs.

This is wrong and the PM must act post haste in the simple but vital recommendation for such an appointment.

The Congo may go in turmoil real soon based on antecedents, God forbid. Here at home the uncertainties created, unnecessarily, in my view, is bad optics and sends volumes of chilling messages of the negative. To God then, in all things, be the glory.

ORTLAND H BODIE, Jr

Nassau

January 20, 2019