The Tribune

By DIANE PHILLIPS

IF YOU'RE Bahamian or a resident of The Bahamas, you gotta love the news of a general election coming soon to a neighbourhood near you. Suddenly the MP who promised to stay in touch however many years ago, remembers to actually look you up and see what’s on your mind.

The roads get fixed, the potholes filled, the verges cleared and cleaned. A whole lot of sprucing up gets done in a surprisingly little space of time.

There’s a party feeling in the air.

It’s a lot like having company for dinner and discovering you can repair that chip in the old wooden table. And the burners that haven’t worked for years on the old gas stove can be fixed, and now you have three good ones working, though that fourth burner is still defying your determination to light. (Please light.)

Yep, elections are a lot like having company for dinner. They trigger the small actions that make for a prettier face – and everyone is grateful. A kind of dusting off and taking a fresh look. The big stuff, well, unfortunately, that gets left for another time.

There’s still no freedom of information act, transparency, or commitment to accountability. We haven’t accepted the fact that businesses will only absorb so much in fees before they start to look elsewhere or wonder why they bother to open their doors on a daily basis.

We haven’t accepted the fact that businesses will, sooner or later, turn talk, complaints and justifiable bellyaching about constantly increasing taxes and costs and just go elsewhere, a sad reality when the cure is right before our eyes. A standard corporate tax that’s clear and doesn’t waiver because someone needs to raise funds and sends inspectors ‘to find the money.’ How long will we continue a regressive tax regime where high volume and low return is taxed unduly, or the poorest among us pay the highest percentage of their wages? How are we ever supposed to attract new business based on the current business license fee scheme?

We have yet to standardize expectations, requirements, and regulations for development with a schedule and formula: x number of units means y amount of green space, or park or playground or clinic or community centre or ambulance. That stuff is still the stuff of heads of agreements, behind-closed-doors negotiations that resemble a movie set reserved for the privileged few. This kind of set makes investors nervous and puts the government in the position of requesting, demanding, wriggling, negotiating, wrangling and leveraging, all of which could be misinterpreted as a shakedown.

It would be so much easier to just standardize requirements.

We haven’t tapped into the basics of why we are such enemies to our own environment. We haven’t taken the draconian Singapore approach--or even a South Beach stab--at penalizing those who abandon properties and think it’s perfectly acceptable to walk away from them and let nature take over, while leaving neighbourhoods to deal with repossessed homes that degrade properties around them and invite rodents to move right in. You’re welcome here.

But there is, as I said, the good news about an election announcement.

We clean up the junk cars and abandoned vehicles and order streetside liquor windows to close. Hanging baskets with a little greenery dot Bay Street. Small contractors get jobs. Work crews line highways and byways. Stores selling cutlasses and lawn mowers scramble, trying to order more, especially cutlasses.

Too bad about the signage blight, it’s about to hit an all-time high. Carmichael Road’s billboard trail, snipe signs and storefront lettering, already explosive, goes into hyperdrive. And corners like Milo Butler Highway and TWD become insults to sensitive eyes.

It’s okay, though. There will be a party or rally to go to, with lots of food and camaraderie and cheer and colours.

Yep, elections are a lot like having company for dinner. The moments before them are filled with fast actions to set a pretty table. Pots of flowers, but no planting of seeds. This time won’t be any different, but what would it look like if it were? Suppose there were a check list, a national survey in which every citizen entitled to vote registered not for the party they lean toward, but for the issues and the country they want to see.

What if each of us sent a personal wish list to candidates and those wish lists became a registry of requests for governance? We teach our kids to do it. We sit with them as they write their letters to Santa, or kneel with them as they say their prayers. Why--if we can tell Santa what we want as a child once a year at Christmas, or beg God for favours every night--can’t we register our wants and needs and begs with our own government? And what better time than pre-election?

Or we can just do what we always do: be grateful for the food at rallies and thank the MP for remembering we live in his or her constituency (and, oh yes, a special thank you for mowing that lawn on the roadside in front of us.)

We call in to radio and listen as the same few voices demand to be heard. We call out to each other in Whatsapp groups and family gatherings in loud voices, and then sit back and obediently settle for too little. We are still young as a nation, they tell us. What are we supposed to do or expect? After all, the place is peaceful and relatively safe. We should be grateful.

When will we learn that we get what we demand?

And when what we demand is for the good of the country, not just ourselves, we get the country we deserve.