The Tribune

YOUR SAY

By KEOD SMITH

THE Office of Prime Minister is bigger than the occupant. What the Chair did to Mr Ingraham will unfavourably mark the manner of our bearing for years to come.

“I do not agree with what you have to say” wrote Voltaire in another century, “but I will defend to death your right to say it.”

While the political chicanery of the Parliament would suggest that the Right Honourable Hubert A Ingraham, outgoing Prime Minister, was not being denied an opportunity to speak, the cold hard reality is that the manner of our bearing was bludgeoned by the Speaker on Wednesday, July 25, 2012, and is now forever ingrained into the content of our character.

Yes, we were all engaged in a hard fought, intense general election campaign. I, perhaps more than any other politician who was not contesting a seat, was most ebullient and severe in a campaign to see Mr Ingraham and his Free National Movement government booted out of office.

That is a small demand of the democracy in which we live. A bigger demand is that at all times, the Bahamian people be allowed unfettered access to other opinions than that of the government and an alternative to the government is always at the ready.

That is the irony of the energy and force that creates and maintains a democracy. Tamper with a scintilla of it and anarchy starts sounding its volatile bell.

On July 19, 2012, Mr Ingraham, through great fanfare and pre-publicity, presented to the Speaker of the House of Assembly a short but definitive letter stating without any room for ambiguity that his resignation from the seat he has held onto for 35 years, as of that day, was to take effect from August 31, 2012.

Mr Ingraham then proceeded to hold a news conference in the precincts of the House where, in his trademark style, he delivered a truncheon of criticisms against the new PLP government led by the Right Honourable Perry G Christie.

One has to always bear in mind that Mr Christie and Mr Ingraham are identical in many ways. They both operated as law partners behind the shingle Christie Ingraham & Co for many years. They both got elected to the House of Assembly as PLP candidates for the first time on July 19, 1977, making them both, until August 31, 2012, co-joined Fathers of the House of Assembly.

They were both serving ministers in the Pindling PLP government in 1983 when the infamous NBC report broke on drug related corruption at the highest level in our country. They were both fired by Sir Lynden on the same day. They both ran as independents against PLP Candidates in the 1987 general election and they both won. Here their stories diverge.

Mr Ingraham got himself chosen as the leader of the Free National Movement in May 1990 – within days of the death of the founding leader of the FNM and leader of the opposition, Sir Cecil Wallace Whitfield, while Mr Christie had by 1988 returned to the PLP and an appointment as Minister of Agriculture Trade and Industry.

Mr Ingraham would go onto beat the PLP in the by-election to fill the vacancy on Sir Cecil’s death and two years later, he would end the longest political dynasty of a Prime Minister in the English Commonwealth when he defeated Sir Lynden and the PLP on August 19, 1992.

Sir Lynden led the PLP against Mr Ingraham again in 1997 but was defeated. Sir Lynden would resign as leader of the PLP within days of that general election, and summon his party into a convention which elected Mr Christie as leader, a position in which he has held ever since. Sir Lynden died in 2000.

Leading up to the 2002 general election, Mr Ingraham ran into political difficulties within his party. The FNM would be led by Tommy Turnquest, who also had the distinction of losing his parliamentary seat as leader.

Mr Christie led the PLP to its first victory over the FNM on May 2, 2002. By mid-2005, Mr Ingraham had re-claimed the leadership of the FNM and thereupon, was re-appointed leader of the opposition.

Two years later, on May 2, 2007, Mr Ingraham defeated Mr Christie’s government.

That the long friendship and partnership they once enjoyed would be strained by the politics of the hour, should have been expected.

They named the complex they built for their successful law firm for their wives. They were godfathers of each other’s children. Together in the mid 1980s they were the classic Bahamian political Dream Team which many people thought would have united to defeat Sir Lynden and the PLP.

History takes its own course and they ended up, as it were, like the Damon and Pythias of Roman legend, fierce and self-confessed bitter combatants.

One day. the question will be answered, what was it all worth?

Mr Ingraham had made famous a claim many years ago that whenever he left the political stage he would take Mr Christie with him.

While Mr Christie remained as leader of the PLP after losing the 2007 general election, on the night of his defeat in May 2012, Mr Ingraham told the country that he fully accepted the blame for his party’s loss and would not be taking his seat in the new Parliament, it being his intention to resign his seat and retire from public life.

The Bahamas may be one of the most highly charged political theatres in the world. Sycophants, party loyalists and revisionist dot the landscape.

That Mr Ingraham introduced private broadcasting to the country in 1992 after 50 years of a monopoly held and tightly controlled by the state owned Broadcasting Corporation of the Bahamas, has given the political synergy of this country even more piston power.

Rightly or wrongly, it is the recipe for democracy and when served up in unequal portions, the democracy will have its bouts of chronic indigestion.

So, almost immediately the spin proprietors went to work on whether Mr Ingraham would go or stay. They wondered aloud whether his announcement was a trick, treat or a plot.

Others just weighed in, hoping for their voices to be heard flanking the government’s side in hopes that the pork barrel politics of the dispensation would get them a few more brownie points than their most silent neighbours for whatever they eyed in the government’s gift basket.

The point is that while this tempest was blowing all around us, leadership faced its greatest challenge and test to be focused, balanced, civil and right.

Yes, it was an acrimonious general election campaign. Feelings were hurt. Egos bruised. Characters maligned. But from the darkest days of UBP oppression, this has been the norm of the exactitude of our politics. No one worth his salt wears it on his sleeve.

I recall now the bitter campaign of the 1982 general election. Kendal Isaacs was a small wry man without much oratorical delivery, referred to as “Old Sore Throat”, a pun on the fact that he had been diagnosed with a serious throat ailment and did not contest the 1977 general election because he was convalescing from a series of rigid and difficult surgical operations.

However, his steadfast and relentless repeat of his criticism of Sir Lynden and the PLP metamorphosed into the strongest opposition movement against the PLP up to that time.

Yet the PLP in its political zeal had no difficulty in using this most personal and horrendous of circumstances, his ill-health, to score against him.

That being as it may, it would be Sir Lynden who would leave his pew in St Francis Xavier’s Roman Catholic Church at Mass on a Sunday morning, to extend to Mr and Mrs Isaacs, after that bitter general election, the handshake of peace.

As a people, we seem to have always been able to heal quickly after the barbs and torments of a general election.

I suppose when we take this all in today, we have to marvel at how Sir Lynden would recommend Cecil Wallace-Whitfield for a Knighthood, which was well-deserved.

It did not matter what had transpired over the bitter years of their political feud. They knew where it began and where it ended. And they knew how to come together and build country and not be caught up in self.

Mr Ingraham told his party and the nation of his intention to resign the seat and to retire from public life. On July 19, 2012, he went to the Speaker and formally presented his resignation letter.

He told his news conference that it was his intention to formally present his resignation and retirement to Parliament on Wednesday July 25, 2012, the next sitting of the House after he had handed his resignation to the Speaker.

The Rules of the House establish this as the formal process for a member to resign in accordance with the constitution. No gerrymandering of the rules and politicisation of mother goose grammarians and pseudo intellectuals can reduce Mr Ingraham’s letter to that of a Promissory Note.

I knew trouble was brewing when I read the strap line story on the Nassau Guardian of Saturday July 21, 2012 in which a senior official of my party, in referring to Mr Ingraham’s remarks at that July 19, 2012 news conference, termed the former Prime Minister “uncouth”.

I suppose many PLPs will be upset with me for saying this, but that is not the language I think we would wish to engage in before a youthful population, already cynical, frustrated and distrusting of politicians. So sad. So unnecessarily inappropriate.

I would wish to remind fellow PLPs that even in Sir Lynden’s case, when he spoke in the Parliament under the old rules to read his resignation of the South Andros seat into the record, his actual resignation would not become effective until the following day.

So, to apply the “logic” of Speaker Major, the question which must be asked and answered is whether Sir Lynden’s letter was only “ostensibly” a resignation or “in reality” just a promissory note. LOL.

CLR James, the Caribbean writer, long ago opined that one of our deficiencies is we fail to accept that there is an indigenous way of doing things.

Surely there must be merit in following the Bahamian precedent. Surely if we want people to mark the manner of our bearing we would want to be seen as a people who still remember Pindling’s words of 1968: “Look up and move on. The world is watching.”

I raised the point earlier about the acrimony of the political fight. What could have been more insidious than the battle of August 1992 when Sir Lynden lost and the PLP Empire lay crumbled in the murky stench of the opposition for ten years, a degrading Commissions of Inquiry and an FNM which seemed relentless in re-writing history and consigning the PLP forever to the trash bin of history.

However, when the time came for Sir Lynden, a former Prime Minister, out of that office for five years, to be allowed that opportunity in the House of Assembly as the Father of that place, it would be Prime Minister Hubert Ingraham who was accommodating.

Sir Lynden said as much on the day he made that communication, July 7, 1997. PLPs may wish to re-visit Sir Lynden’s moving elegy and hear him thank the Right Honourable Gentleman from Cooper’s Town for making the opportunity possible.

Cable Bahamas, every private radio station, ZNS TV and radio, beamed Sir Lynden’s farewell address live and across the archipelago and, indeed, on the World Wide Web.

That was the precedent which had been established by Sir Lynden and the PLP for the first Premier of the then Colony of the Bahamas, Sir Roland Symonette, in 1978.

Mr Ingraham and his government continued it in 1997 at Sir Lynden’s resignation and retirement.

There is no justification for it not having been followed for Mr Ingraham’s resignation and retirement, only out of office as Prime Minister for two months.

I am a PLP of the highest order. I am not a Pindling PLP, Perry Christie PLP or a Brave Davis PLP. I am simply a PLP and believe that my stance reflects that of thousands of PLP’s across our country who believe it to be decent and indeed, inherently PLP to have allowed Mr Ingraham to make his resignation and retirement communication.

As a former Member of Parliament, I wish to impress on those privileged enough to now sit as lawmakers that the thrust of the honour that underpins the Parliament is to be embraced as evidencing the truth of the adage that written laws control lesser men while right conduct controls the greater ones.

The Bahamas is bigger than the current players on the political stage. Of lesser interest and concern are their personal feelings over what was said about them on the political stump.

A former Prime Minister of the Commonwealth of the Bahamas was denied a precedent that he afforded a Prime Minister and the greatest leader the PLP will ever know, Sir Lynden Pindling. For me, I will not be restrained by criticism of the politics which went into that most egregious of decisions.

Scholars and citizens 100 years from today have every right to be able to consult The Hansard and read and listen to the parting words of Sir Lynden Pindling, Mr Hubert Ingraham and the others who will follow.

To have denied a people that right and opportunity just to get the last poke of spite against Mr Ingraham is unbecoming of us as a people.

I close with the words I borrow from the conclusion of the second inaugural address of Abraham Lincoln in March 1865. I want to encourage all Bahamians to wind up each of our election battles with a collective commitment to move forward “With malice towards none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds”.