The Tribune

By S. Timothy Roberts

Tribune Night Editor

“A sovereignty that must ask permission is not sovereignty. It is a lease.”

THAT was Prime Minister Philip ‘Brave’ Davis at the United Nations General Assembly last week.

It is a good line. It is also one worth testing against our own realities.

Sovereignty is, at its simplest, a country’s authority to govern itself — to make its own laws and run its own affairs without foreign interference. It is independence. It is the freedom to choose our path and decide how we grow and develop.

Every country, in theory, has that choice.

In practice, powerful nations have never been particularly shy about exerting their influence on smaller ones. And while the powerful fight for dominance, it is often the weaker countries that bear the weight of their clashes.

We know this well.

Over the past year, under threat of US visa sanctions against Bahamian officials and their families, the government rewrote the contracts of Cuban healthcare workers and sent the new draft to Washington for review. This summer it declined to renew the contracts of 31 Cuban teachers.

We are independent.

We are also very dependent.

The Recent Row

Davis’s speech didn’t come out of nowhere. It landed in the middle of a very public dispute with the United States.

On 18 September, a Bahamian delegation met US Justice Department officials in Washington to complain that “rogue” Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents had been operating here without the consent of the government or the Royal Bahamas Police Force.

Our Ambassador to the US, Wendall Jones, confirmed the meeting. He noted that we authorise seven DEA agents to work in The Bahamas. The complaint is about those operating outside that arrangement.

US Ambassador Herschel Walker dismissed the claim as “fake news”. He then publicly asked why Bahamian officials were concerned that the United States “helped to arrest a known drug trafficker”.

Attorney General Wayne Munroe went further. He said the DEA agents who ran undercover operations here had breached the Dangerous Drugs Act, and pointed out that Bahamian officers could not do the same thing on American soil while tracing the guns that flow south.

There is another part of this story worth noting.

The undercover operation at the centre of the row was revealed after the arrest of Jonathan Eric Gardiner in May. When Gardiner was detained following a plane crash off Florida, authorities say he was carrying about $30,000 in Bahamian currency in an envelope bearing the handwritten name of a Bahamian politician. The name was redacted in US court filings and identified only as “Politician-1”.

The DEA affidavit went further. It alleged that “Politician-1” had met an undercover DEA source and a pilot inside a Parliament building in October 2024 to discuss an upcoming cocaine shipment.

Jones says the Gardiner case had nothing to do with the government’s complaint about unauthorised DEA operations.

Perhaps.

But it is what revealed just how far those undercover operations had apparently gone. And it is the reason Walker’s jab stings.

What the Row Tells Us

Two things can be true at once.

The United States should respect Bahamian law on Bahamian soil.

And a sovereignty claim is only as strong as a state’s ability to police itself.

Consider Munroe’s own words. In March, as Minister of National Security, he told the inaugural Americas Counter-Cartel Conference in Florida: “Consistent with our existing bilateral agreements and with full respect for the sovereignty and laws of each country, and with due regard to international legal norms, the Ministry of National Security intends to work closely with the United States Department of War in expanding joint military cooperation, recognising the shared responsibility for regional security and stability.”

In the same speech, he asked Washington to substantially expand its support for the Royal Bahamas Defence Force, “not as a concession to a small partner but as a strategic investment”.

That isn’t hypocrisy.

We have worked alongside the US through OPBAT since 1982, and with this much ocean sitting across the hemisphere’s main trafficking routes, we could not police our waters alone even if we wanted to.

The real question is not whether we depend on others. Of course we do.

The question is when dependence becomes subservience — and I think that depends, at least partly, on what we bring to the table ourselves.

Davis has a name for this. Opening an international telecommunications forum in Nassau earlier this month, he described a “sovereignty discount”: the price a country pays when it has to negotiate without real alternatives. Sovereignty, he said, is rarely taken from a nation. “It is conceded, one reasonable concession at a time.”

There is something important in that.

Because it also provides the honest answer to Walker.

Every officer who takes a bribe, every case we cannot build ourselves and every concession we make because we have nowhere else to turn widens that discount. We cannot demand to be treated as a full sovereign while leaving the policing of our own institutions to someone else.

We can complain about the intrusion. We may be entirely justified in doing so.

But we also have to ask why the opportunity for intrusion exists in the first place.

A Little Further Back

We became independent in 1973, and it was rightly celebrated. Some still debate whether full independence was necessary then, given that we already had internal self-government.

That debate is academic now.

We chose independence.

More than 50 years later, the more useful question is: what do we intend to do with it?

Political independence has not brought economic independence. We import our food and energy. We rely on foreign capital and investment, foreign markets, foreign technology and expertise, and tourists who come overwhelmingly from abroad. And, as the DEA row shows, our security is bound up with a much larger neighbour.

Nkrumah warned the leaders of newly independent Africa that political freedom was only the first step, and that economic independence would demand the same determination.

But there is a practical limit to this argument too.

No small country can eliminate dependence, nor should it try. Even the largest economies depend on one another. The realistic goal is not some fantasy of complete self-sufficiency.

It is to build enough national capacity that dependence does not become subservience.

If the government believes what it has said this month — the lease, the sovereignty discount, Munroe’s insistence that our sovereignty is not of a lesser “value or quality” — then the rhetoric should lead somewhere practical.

What is the plan for turning formal sovereignty into something more real?

Government’s part is clear enough: education, infrastructure, energy, food security, a more diverse economy, institutions that work, domestic enterprise, technical skill and sensible management of foreign investment.

That is a lot.

It is also not enough.

The Sovereignty of Us

Government can create the conditions for national capacity. It cannot manufacture it.

That capacity ultimately lives in us — in our knowledge and skills, our productivity and enterprise, our discipline, our sense of civic responsibility and our willingness to use the opportunities in front of us.

Remember now those 31 Cuban teachers.

The Ministry of Education says foreign teachers are hired only where no suitably qualified Bahamian can be found, and some of them were teaching specialised subjects such as welding and agriculture.

There is nothing wrong with bringing in expertise we do not have. Countries do it all the time.

But every post we cannot fill ourselves is also a small piece of sovereignty we rent from someone else.

Yet there is a fundamental contradiction in wanting The Bahamas to depend less on foreign powers while so many of us instinctively turn to the government to solve our personal difficulties. Expecting increased national sovereignty is illogical if we continue to relinquish our personal independence.

Greater national sovereignty has to come with greater individual agency.

That means developing ourselves through education and work. It means taking responsibility for our circumstances where we actually have the power to change them. It means creating rather than simply consuming. And it means accepting something we all know, but do not always particularly like hearing: government cannot solve every problem.

Government can provide good schools. We have to learn.

It can build infrastructure. We have to use it productively.

It can create opportunities. We still have to do something with them.

None of that absolves government of its responsibilities. Quite the opposite. A government asking its people to do more for themselves has an even greater obligation to ensure incompetence, corruption and bad policy are not standing in their way.

But sovereignty cannot exist only in Parliament, Cabinet or a speech at the United Nations. If it means anything, it eventually has to find its way down to the people themselves.

Davis is right that our ancestors did not break their chains so their children could become tenants.

But a lease is not only something another country imposes on us.

Sometimes it is something we sign ourselves, quietly, when we stop building the capacity to do things for ourselves.

A country that wants to stand firmly on its own needs citizens who are able, and willing, to do the same.

In the end, a nation capable of governing itself requires individuals capable of governing themselves.