The Tribune

By YOURI KEMP

Tribune Business Reporter

ykemp@tribunemedia.net

The taxi union president yesterday vowed to stage another Rawson Square protest tomorrow as he accused the Government of failing to meet its demands.

Wesley Ferguson, the Bahamas Taxi Cab Union's (BTCU) head, told Tribune Business it should not take the Government six years to make a decision on the colour of taxi plates.

"The Ministry of Transport is telling us nothing," he lamented. "They have been completely silent, and I could only assume that our matters will be raised at Cabinet today, so there may be some kind of commentary from us at a certain time and a certain place as we try to bring more awareness to this matter.”

The union has been lobbying the Government to change the colour of taxi plates so that they are differentiated from self-drive (SD) plates, since persons often confuse the two. Its other grievance relates to the fact that since the Government lifted the moratorium on taxi plates at the end of December, its members have not been issued any new plates.

Mr Ferguson added: “This has been too long and the Government is running out of time. They’re just buying time to deflect or to put it off for political gain, and I don’t want it to be political because it won’t be long before they start calling up taxi drivers and ask them about who they are voting for and all that other stuff before they give us these taxi plates.

"I want this to be fair and honest and transparent across the board, and the only way to get that done is to keep their feet to the fire and make sure they do it the way we had agreed to do it.”

The union also wants a specific taxi plate colour so that the Bahamian people can distinguish between legitimate taxi drivers and a “hacker”.

Dion Foulkes, minister for labour and transport, said earlier this month that the Government is now in the process of deciding which colour they will assign the taxi drivers, and that a decision would soon be taken.

Mr Ferguson, though, talking up the dangers associated with using unlicensed drivers or so-called hackers, added: “It's mind boggling as to what reason they have behind not wanting to do this.The whole point is look at the dangerous part of it. When we do start to have tourists again? They have been getting away with it for so long, these SD cars masquerading as taxi drivers.

“If a tourist is involved in an accident and if they get hurt, or God forbid they die, that’s going to cost the Government mega millions of dollars to get out of that because these cars are not licensed or insured to carry passengers for hire.

“Why doesn’t the government safeguard themselves before something happens? They have got to see the danger in this. Why can’t they be proactive rather than reactive?”

Mr Ferguson said he has been through this argument with the former minister for transport, Glenys Hanna-Martin, under the Progressive Liberal Party (PLP) administration, and now three different ministers for transport with the current Free National Movement (FNM) administration.

He added: “It should not take six years to fix something that they all classify as a mistake. Something else must be going on behind the scenes that we don’t know. This can’t be normal for the Government not to do this; for something that is such a simple fix.

“We’re not asking for an industrial agreement, no raise, no nothing. This is just about the colour of the taxi plates, and to issue the taxi plates we have been negotiating for since 2018. Then we are gone and out of the way. Then we will shut up. We will be back out in front of Parliament for a protest on Wednesday morning at about 9am until 10.30am.”