The Tribune

By Rupert Missick Jr

SUPPORT for the underdog has always been a powerful political myth in our country. Every party claims this is the current that runs through their agenda, telling us that their policies favour the least among us and are geared toward lifting the “little man” from “Over the Hill” up to his natural dignified place in society.

This “little man” who lives “Over the Hill” is seen as nothing more than a victim who warrants the sympathies of a benevolent central government.

However, the distance between sympathy and action that would provide the “little man” with the opportunities to be a self sufficient and a self actualized human being seems to always lay in the convenient two miles between the doors of parliament and the doors of the people in these communities.

In the Bahamas, the individual was never told that he or she could make it on their own and were led to believe that they and their communities could only survive with the intervention and support of the central government.

This concept has almost been as detrimental as the national ethos of entitlement inculcated by the political class, a sort of benign fascism that promises social mobility by virtue of our race and nationality.

That self-actualization, self-determination and success could be achieved through the hard work of the individual and not through the largesses of the state was never a popular value among them. As a matter of fact it was not one that they would have found convenient for their people to have.

As we continue with the McCabe Project, we have found – thus far anyway – that many people see the crime problem in the Bahamas as an issue of political will. In that crime is a natural outcropping of unemployment and unemployment is the result of an uncreative, sluggish government unable to produce jobs.

This may seem like an oversimplification of the issue but in desperate, poverty ridden communities populated by an increasingly angry disfranchised people who have been taught for generations and have been intentionally led to believe that their ability to obtain work is tied to the fortunes of one political party or the next, perception is all of the reality that is needed to create havoc for those who share a different reality.

It cannot be that the point of view of the poor and undereducated are only valid if they are reinforced by the view of our government or its institutions.

In the end, civics, political science and lofty macro and microeconomic theories be damned, in the minds of many of these people they were promised that the hunger pangs of today would disappear tomorrow – as if by magic – if their ballots were cast for the right people.

The only way that “Over the Hill” can provide enough for its people is if the monopoly of the central government is broken and the country’s resources are redistributed in these communities through some system of local government.

This is a longer, complicated path possibly strewn with false starts and a lot of growing pains, but it will provide more of an access to the opportunity and money the people need than the year long excitement of election season followed by the five years of heartbreak and disappointment that they have become accustomed to.

The decentralization of government resources, governmental power and governmental responsibilities will go a long way in letting people know they can make it and that they don’t have to be reliant on the state for their daily bread. That would be true, on the ground, self determination.

In a perfect world, free from insecure politicians too afraid of true democracy and fearful of sharing their power with the people, each constituency could be governed by an independent counsel of people who live in that community, elected every two to three years and whose financial undertaking are audited and published and laid bare for public scrutiny annually.

The ability of people to take care of their own communities, to give out contracts to people in their community to fix and upkeep their own parks, their own schools, clean up their own neighbourhoods, collect their own trash, pave their own roads, and to fund the social outreach projects already functioning in their community would be transformative.

If the people who live in and use the government schools, clinics and libraries located in their neighbourhoods were given carriage over them and were able to hold their administrators to account for the performance and standards of these institutions, that would be revolutionary.

The obstacles to make this a reality does not come from malevolence but a lack of political will that matches the purported sympathy of the political class with action.

Some believe that this is what the government’s Urban Renewal Programme is already doing in these communities. Well it is not. This is a fact we need to come to terms with.

Much of the Urban Renewal Programme is laudable and the intent of its establishment cannot be faulted, but it is not a governing body made up of the people of the communities in which the programme exists.

If fact, what it does is reaffirm the already large footprint of the central government in the day-to-day affairs of these areas, doing so much of what the people of these communities can do for themselves.

In some neighbourhoods it actually represents a larger bureaucratic duplication of efforts, providing services that some groups in these distressed communities have been doing for years just without the high profile support of political celebrities.

As a matter of fact, some of these long established community groups find themselves competing with this government entity for donations from the private sector.

We judge the suffering and struggle of others through our narrow frame of reference. We measure the value of other people’s efforts in relation to our own.

We dismiss our neighbour’s lack of education, their failure to find a job, the cycle of poverty their family seems trapped in as symptoms of a people who are not trying hard enough or at least are not trying as hard as we did or do.

We all do this from time to time. It’s a human problem.

However, it is all too easy to judge the state of a person who has never been told that they could make it on their own in the first place.