The Tribune

EDITOR, The Tribune.

On the very same day last week that Arthur Hanna, the lead architect of Bahamianisation, slipped into history, I had the dubious honour of meeting one of the Free National Movement’s batch of candidates for the upcoming election.

The meeting place was the BTC office in the Family Island constituency that she seeks to represent, and the occasion was her interruption of my lecture to a group of young Bahamians on how stark the difference between the two parties is in terms of the big issues facing Bahamians.

I was pointing out to the young Bahamians present that, when it came to power in 1992, Ingraham’s government (which I then enthusiastically supported, as a young, somewhat naïve person) damaged their prospects even before their birth by greatly easing the acquisition by foreigners of Bahamian land yet failing to ensure that commensurate benefits flowed to Bahamians from such a move.

I pointed out that, as a land attorney, I am aware that a solid proportion of the luxury homes now lining the coast of their island belong to foreigners who owe the government, collectively, many tens of millions of dollars in unpaid Real Property Tax bills– not to mention unpaid taxes for renting out their homes to other foreigners for often tens of thousands of dollars weekly.

In fact, just one foreign owner owes more than $8 million in Real Property Tax, having not paid a dime since acquiring the properties more than a decade ago. This is publicly available information, yet few FNM politicians deem it worthy of public discussion, even as they stress our supposed inability to fund universal healthcare or their need to borrow billions to run the country – billions that are then paid back by taxes on the poor (on their food, clothes, gas and other daily necessities).

Finally, I was pointing out to the young Bahamians that, at this very moment, a rags-to-riches Bahamian businessman in Nassau is being prosecuted by the Treasurer for non-payment of Real Property Taxes and having his property on Bay Street taken away. Yet there is not one single case of any of the hundreds of foreigners who have abused the privilege of owning luxury property on their island ever being subject to such an eventuality. This is not an oversight. It is FNM policy.

It was at that point that the FNM candidate chimed in. Claiming ignorance of the abuse of Real Property Taxes by foreigners on the island she seeks to represent, or of her government’s discriminatory enforcement policy against Bahamians, she instead turned the question around to ask what the PLP had done for Bahamians.

That question was, of course, a gift. While I conceded that the PLP’s biggest failure was not to have reversed the FNM’s most harmful policies, I easily demonstrated that, in terms of tangible benefits to the masses of Bahamians, there remains no comparison between the parties by reference either to their historical record or the present day.

Having no cogent response to my long list of institutions, laws and protections for Bahamians that enabled the PLP to create, grow and sustain the Bahamian middle class (and which the FNM has chipped away at every time they got in power, with predictable results for that middle class), she turned away with the parting comment “anyway, the PLP didn’t introduce National Insurance, that was Sir Randol Fawkes”!

I am told that the candidate in question is an educator. If she teaches history, this country’s in trouble.

ANDREW ALLEN

Nassau,

August 8, 2021