The Tribune

EDITOR, The Tribune.

In 2017, the Free National Movement came to power atop a crest of lies, amplified by a deeply biased media. How very fitting that in 2021 it was swept away in a tide of ugly truths, despite all the best efforts of the media to mask them.

Right up to the end of the recent campaign, the Nassau Guardian was attempting to draw a false equivalency between Mr. Davis’ failure to distance himself from Jerome Fitzgerald (wrongly accused of impropriety in a made-up scandal) and Dr. Minnis’ refusal to even address the serious allegations levelled against Desmond Bannister and Adrian Gibson.

So biased is our mainstream media that many Bahamians have by now lost the means to judge the performance of administrations objectively. This culminated in the tragic error made by voters in 2017 and the resulting nightmare of the last 4 years and 4 months.

As I pointed out at the time, in terms of tangible advances for Bahamians, Perry Christie’s government that was voted out of office in 2017 achieved far more than any other since Pindling left office. It created BAMSI and the University of The Bahamas and dramatically increased the conviction rate by our criminal courts with its Swift Justice initiative.

It also (under Mr. Fitzgerald’s impressive tenure as Minister of Education) dramatically advanced the access to technology of students in Bahamian public classrooms.

But most critically, it commenced enrollment of National Health Insurance, finally beginning to channel the wealth of this country into the vital service of those to whom it ultimately belongs. It would likely by now have helped nudge government toward (long overdue) taxes on wealth and income to finance its expansion, further reducing the wealth gap that FNM policies have widened.

I spent the last week of the campaign asking every young Bahamian that I encountered if they realized that the FNM, in coming to office, immediately halted the enrollment of Bahamians under NHI, while actually rolling out a host of “user fees” for people like them and their families if they got sick, even as it ruled out income tax on rich companies and maintained a tax break on million dollar homes in Lyford Cay.

Most were shocked and said they had no idea of this. Yet they often had a vague sense of corruption in politics and imbibed the utterly false notion that both parties are the same in terms of policies that affect them. This, sadly, is our media at work.

Meanwhile, Hubert Ingraham, as always more interested in egotistical score-settling than in the actual advancement of Bahamians, busied himself promoting select FNM candidates (as if he didn’t realize that helping the FNM win even one seat exposed us all to the danger of five more years of Minnis) and recommending as Prime Minister the man who effectively halted NHI just before the Covid-19 crisis exposed our disgraceful, profit-driven health system for the cruel scam that it is.

The whole Bahamas owes a debt of gratitude to the voters of the Elizabeth constituency for helping put an end to that frightening prospect.

It now falls to Mr. Davis to prove to Bahamians that the dumb, pro-rich policies of Ingraham, Sands and Minnis are what ails this country and that, although the latter may stand out as an historical aberration in terms of pure, ignorant, abrasive incompetence, the whole FNM cannot be trusted to govern The Bahamas again until it changes those policies, which benefit only its paymasters.

That could be a while.

ANDREW ALLEN

Nassau,

September 18, 2021