The Tribune

EDITOR, The Tribune.

Benjamin Disraeli, the 19th Century British Prime Minister, when once asked to clarify the distinction between a misfortune and a calamity, illustrated his response with two scenarios involving his great rival, William Gladstone.

A misfortune, he said, would be if Mr Gladstone fell into the Thames one morning on his way to Westminster. A calamity would be if someone fished him out before he drowned.

A calamity, then, is something with long-lasting negative effects, while a misfortune is an isolated event whose negativity is inherent and discrete.

Hubert Minnis’ thankfully brief stint in office bore the hallmarks of a mere misfortune in that it will have left no lasting imprint on the structure of the Bahamian economy, society or development model. That he achieved nothing was the only blessing of his premiership – aside from its brevity.

But the calamity is larger and more enduring than Minnis. Since 1992, successive administrations have normalised aspects of an economic agenda that, unless reappraised, will continue to challenge The Bahamas’ efforts to regain the initiative in national development that it once unquestionably held.

Vast concessions to investors, which reflect neither the country’s high cost and income profile nor its innate desirability as an investment destination, are coupled with internal tax policies that exempt the rich and the foreign and hammer the poor at every opportunity. The dystopian results (slow growth and high unemployment among them) are then sold as a pretext for more “medicine”.

The giveaway of BTC is still having dreadful consequences for national development, undiminished by Mr Christie’s weak efforts of redress – itself driven by a false belief that an actual take-back would have caused a loss of “investor confidence”.

As the recently revealed Royal Caribbean/Minnis deal demonstrates, our problem as a nation is not of “investor confidence”, but rather of “investor over-reach” fed by a national inferiority complex unknown in the Pindling or UBP eras. That is why we have so little to show (in terms of advances in living standards) for the massive investment inflows that have come our way since 1992.

National development planning was (in the Ingraham era) reduced to farcical “Heads of Agreements” with foreigners, which made a mockery of notions of accountability and transparency long before Minnis took it to perverse and comical extremes with the Oban debacle.

No amount of retrospective “tabling” in Parliament can justify governments meeting in closed rooms with foreign interests and signing away vast concessions from the patrimony of Bahamians in return for politically convenient trinkets. Minnis illustrated its absurdity, but he was not its progenitor.

I agree with those who contend that we are too politically tribalised a society and that this sometimes blinds us to issues. But the deeper blindness is one inherent in a view of the two parties as fresh contenders for office every five years – divorced from their historical records and reflecting only the new faces that front them.

This view, which has become prevalent in part because of the cyclical failures of an economic model re-engineered 30 years ago, actually engenders stagnation masquerading as “change”.

When viewed in historical, rather than in party political terms, the record illustrates that the era that began in 1992 has been a failure by every important metric when compared with the preceding era – in growth rates, income disparities, violent crime and the sustainability of the middle class.

It is no coincidence that the latter era was characterized by national self-confidence, institution-building, public investment and Bahamianisation, while the former has featured a capitulation to neo-liberal capitalism, divestment of public assets, a beggarly approach to foreign investment and a stubborn faith in the long-debunked myth of trickle-down economics.

ANDREW ALLEN

Nassau,

December 5, 2021.