Virtual presentation at the “Colonialism, Color and Class” Conference of the University of The Bahamas North … Freeport, Grand Bahama … 23 May 2023
National development has long been a concern and focus of my research and writing. Recently, concern has deepened to disquiet and even apprehension. Many vampiric forces—political, social, environmental, and geopolitical—hover to threaten the nation’s peace, and progress. Holding learned forums on such matters deeply impinging national development is an imperative. I thank Dr Ian Strachan and his team for their excellent contribution and for inviting me to present. Juan Perez, the brilliant CIO of Salesforce speaks of ‘constructive dissatisfaction’. This is my route today.
The Bahamas, in 2023, is fifty years old as a sovereign nation and middle-age should signal greater maturity. Yet, past its first proud decade of sovereignty, this country has addressed national development like a callow youth who drives a powerful and costly vehicle untested and unlicensed. Competing with other testosterone-drunk racers, our driver flies in the wrong direction down one-way streets and into dead ends on a thrill ride with fair-weather friends and show-off scrubs. Laws, speed restrictions, wise custom and consequences be damned.
It's time to build a development plan reflecting land and people in all our realities, free of imprudent road choices, reckless speed, and tarty detailing for show rather than roadworthiness.
Hope springs eternal for those who love this blessed archipelago. So, it was when I came across a speech delivered by Prime Minister the Hon. Philip Davis in 2022, nine months after his party’s spectacular election win. In that communication, Mr Davis promised reengagement with development planning as a central element of his governance agenda. Happily, he listed priorities for this vitalexercise.
As promising was the Prime Minister’s assertion that “without a sense of focus, a sense of priorities, “we’ll spread ourselves too thinly, and end up achieving nothing”. Better still, he emphasized essentialinter-dependence. Topping the priorities was education which he deemed “the path to empowerment and prosperity” and a means of enabling Bahamians to access opportunities his administration was seeking to stimulate in today’s color-coded economies.
His admitting to education’s inadequacies and decrying aspects of Web-based social media as countervailing quality was welcome. For this passionate member of the creative sector, the PM, asconcertmaster of his verbal orchestration, launched the music with the announcement of a school for the creative and performing arts. Plans for expanding health and wellness programs were also timely. Next, the PM said rightly, “most national development plans build out from economic policy”. Hefollowed with brief notes on fiscal policy, tourism and diversification.
In this age of ‘wokeness’, real or feigned, there came reference to the prognosticated, archipelago-swallowing climate and environment changes. Up to “cultural and social”, the fifth movement of the concerto, the leader’s speech tripped lightly like Vivaldi’s Spring with only a hint of Winter’s chill. Hesaid he did not wish to “veer into something too bleak” but wanted his audience to understand that “climate change posed an existential threat to our country”.
I was now open to hope. Never mind that the music was sampled as skillful DJs do, rather than elucidating mechanisms for action. I accepted the lightweight listing as strategy, a Potemkin façade built to hide the debris of the heavy construction necessarily engaged to realize stated ambitions. I hoped earnestly that the speech wouldn’t prove illusive—like old western movie props with nothing but desert and tumbleweeds behind.
Then the music screeched to a halt as when the stylus of an old record player skips and scratches avinyl disc arresting its spin. Mr Davis shared his perception that conversations and images on social media too often represent Bahamians as a violent, conflict-driven people. Had our leaders bought into tourism’s mythicizing of the ‘Isles of Perpetual June and ‘life’s a beach’? Indeed, our Out Islands still hold mostly true to this pristine representation. In New Providence, however, where over 70 per cent of Bahamians live and work, violence is already becoming an entrée on the daily menu—sunny side down. Is there awareness of how encroachment on civil liberties that could counter the amelioration of issues government has deemed priorities? While the brighter side of life may be fine as touristattraction, it is dangerously limited as a blueprint for safe living and national advancement.
My view of national development is not the economist’s dizzying array of mathematical constructs,acronyms, and other exercises in obscurantism. My concern is the proliferation of freedom-abrogating factors that undermine human rights and the productivity of vital systems supporting quality life.
Richard Haasse’s “Reluctant Sheriff”, The Bahamas’ powerful next-door neighbour and friend, now wields the biggest stick globally and certainly in Bahamian life, but this is not my focus today. While I thank Britain for its endowment of language, literature and parliamentary democracy, my talk exploresfirst persistent legacies of British rule which have cratered our road to national development.
Secondly, I will reflect upon homegrown colonialism which has made a mockery of the fine principles of majority rule and independence. These operating systems have spawned a complex, insidious ethoswhich syphons the marrow of productivity, civil rights and liberties.
Even with declarations of “independence”, many former colonies have only been able to self-define and manage internal development in tight spaces grudgingly apportioned by global powers. Even more invidious, vital elements of decolonization have advanced too slowly and even stalled because of seemingly impregnable Anglophilia. Many even fight to retain harmful mores and social and economic policies bequeathed by the British imperium.
Our public service is burdened by a convolution of offices and officers, rivalries for prominence and promotion and unwieldy administrative terminology and practices stifling freedom of action, creativity, initiative, and enthusiasm. Anachronistic systems have generated voluminous paper trailsand archives, leading to time, efficiency, and document loss and even invalidity. All contribute to making a mockery of progressivism and ease of doing business. Happily, government is makingsteady incursions into digitization—witness the e-passport, the “My Gateway” platform for accessing a wealth of government services and Central Bank’s initiation of Sand Dollar, the digital Bahamas currency.
Embedded in our justice system is British common law. This body of precedents offers consistency and stability to useful extent. Nevertheless, geographical specificity and age can diminish its value to a developing nation. Exacerbating the problem are deeply reactionary attitudes to law, justice, and penal systems, destructively focused on punishment rather than redemption. How much valuable human capital is lost thereby? Despite the proliferation of legal professionals, the sector seems to addressmodernization at a snail’s pace.
A graver threat to democracy and progress has been self-imposed colonization. Of deep concern, legislators pass essential laws but flout them in practice—to wit, the Public Procurement Acts. How many claims of special circumstances will arise to circumvent these security provisions and allow graft to flourish? As troubling are persistent forms of consumer exploitation. Sketchy monitoring and prosecution promote overpricing and sales of goods and services of substandard quality.
Even graver, we boast of democracy, while supporting freedom’s reciprocals. Prevailing are covert forms of enslavement in the twisted psychology of the once oppressed. The sad irony is that our islands have long been “rocks of refuge” as Marion Bethel terms them. The archipelago was first populated by waves of immigrants in search of freedom, beginning with the Lucayans and the British/Bermudan Eleutherian Adventurers.
Yet, escaping oppression, some migrants readily oppressed in the new homeland. Slave-owningAmerican Loyalist refugees fortified and codified a race/skin colour-based hierarchy and spatial apartheid. Following the World Wars, affluent whites fleeing Britain and the United States to protect their wealth from inflated taxation were none loath to bolster pernicious prejudices.
And how is it that Bahamians of African descent, once a forced underclass, have occupied the greathouse only to repeat strident iniquities, including coercive ethnic biases, tribalism, and new oligarchic dynasties to fortify or extend economic strangleholds. Moreover, politicking has buttressed the absurdities of gender inequities and the award of citizenship. Similarly, election fever fertilizes thetheocratic inclinations of the religious right, dangerously narrowing the essential distance between church and state made law in 1869.
Self-aggrandized and satisfied bigots, cloaked in gorgeous robes, officialdom, ceremony, and sanctimony, supported by large, worshipful followings and mean-spirited fanatics, have become another brand of colonizers. These are they who have written an apocryphal gospel—the Book of Hypocrisy, putting civil liberties on the auction block. This noxious coterie has ‘othered’ Bahamians and migrants whose skin colour falls outside the optimal shades for affluence and social inclusion. They gut the civil liberties of people of dissenting sexual orientation.
While women represent 51.4% of the Bahamian population as compared to 48.6% of males, our sex isdisenfranchised by widespread misogyny. The chief proponents of toxic self-righteousness cherry-pickfrom Scriptures to discount women’s leadership as rulers, judges, seers and salvors through centuries. Bahamian leaders ignore African wisdom that revered the abilities of such queens as Yaa Asantewaa, Nzinga and Amina. Not sufficiently praised are Bahamian women who have served valiantly as family providers and protectors in mitigating paternal delinquency and when their men have sought workabroad. Nor are we celebrated as chief creators and carriers of essential Bahamian narratives. Instead,legal, and practical subalternity is forced on women excelling across the economic spectrum. Why douse this flame to national deprivation?
Today, women’s rights and bodies are colonized. Why are women deemed personalty for the chance-met rapists? Why are wives bound as domestic chattel subject to the will of abusive husbands and others who consider pusillanimous Ephesians exhorting husbands to love their wives as Christ loved the Church.? Even more bizarre is the complicity of sisters who revel in the “little woman” designation. What of proud sovereignty when The Bahamas is one of the 35 counties that have not yetrecognized and criminalized marital rape? How much more suffering and loss from abuse must women and children endure before relief and dignity are chiseled into the stone of law?
Why is gender equality still in suspense—a phantom limb, longed for and aching? We pretend to political correctness by signing hot-topic international treaties on human rights and climate justice without enshrining and energizing them in law and purposive action. We have held two referenda on the subject, both defeated. Incomprehensibly, the electorate’s resounding ‘no’ to a 2013 poll onlegalizing gambling for Bahamians was voided by the stoke of an imperious pen. Gender equality has not been afforded the same grace.
Partisan politics, self-interest, and ignorance have created a dangerous stasis that hampers fair and comprehensive lawmaking. This is a polity that promotes the Bahamian constitution as sacrosanct and locked to amendments. Our laws threaten to become an atrophied skin no longer flexible enough to treat our economic and societal wounds and heal.
We Bahamians have much to be proud of in fostering democracy. By global standards, The Bahamasfreedom index is competitive and even high in terms of political pluralism and participation, as well asstable government and judiciary. We do well in areas of civil liberties such as freedom of expression,belief, association, and union organization. There remain, however, toxicities to be expunged from the rule of law and aforementioned areas of gender equality and personal autonomy.
It’s time to reengage development planning as a genuinely collective and organic endeavor. We mustraise and answer critical, often painful questions.
Of supreme importance—Will national planning embrace in equity all Bahamians, no matter our skincolour, ethnic heritage, sexual orientation, religion, wealth, or percentage we represent in the population? It must.
Furthermore, with increasing calls for the establishment of a republic, can we expect an intelligent comparison of our Westminster parliamentary governance versus a presidential system for best fit?Shouldn’t we also reassess our regional face regarding Caricom membership and potential adoption ofthe Caribbean Court of Justice?
Will the realities of our environment, history, culture and the just needs of our people be viewed through the microscope of truth or obscured by the heavily frosted glass of partisan politics or tourism promotion? Will the protection of national assets be held as sacrosanct or trumped by greed?
Will planners pay attention to geopolitical risks and learn from the successes or mistakes of other states? Will we revise the inequities of citizenship awards, especially as regards Bahamas-born, contributing descendants of Haiti? Or will the latest plan continue to foster indigenous colonialism, condemning too many of our people to a half-life of economic, intellectual, artistic, and spiritual poverty as the native other?
Unless we stem the flood of licentious gun culture, weed out legislative inequities and increase the cultivation of life-preserving freedom, we will reap naught but grapes of wrath. Our Prime Minister has committed to “ensuring that the country’s laws and policies are fair and just for all Bahamians” and to “building a more inclusive and equitable Bahamas”. 1 Parliamentarians and Bahamians in general, there can be no more auspicious time than now to write our names on history’s right-facing pages. Let our Bahamas shine in the annals of freedom.