The Tribune

EDITOR, The Tribune.

Please allow me space in your valuable newspaper to make the following contribution.

Prime Minister Perry Christie said in the House of Assembly recently that the FNM is a party reinventing itself in the aftermath of Hubert Ingraham’s leadership, etc, etc, etc.

Mr Christie has also been spending a lot of time recently in Hollywood and Las Vegas and perhaps he is auditioning for his next career because this present one is going down the tubes fast.

What Mr Christie failed to say is that even compared to the leadership style of Hubert Ingraham, he still comes up short, despite Mr Ingraham’s high handed style of governing, at least he made decisions and he got the job done. Mr. Ingraham’s record on infrastructural development is still impressive, although Mr Christie maintains that it left the country broke.

But Mr Christie can’t win that argument either. Ingraham was following a well tried and proven economic policy that government spending in recessionary times is a good insurance against total economic collapse, plus we have the infrastructure that will serve the country for another fifty years.

Mr Christie on the other hand has been on a $2 billion dollar spending spree of his own, in the past two and a half years, with little to show for it.

Mr Christie needs to compare himself against his own self, and lately the catchword for his administration as inept, inexperienced and irresponsible has been catching on with the public.

Observers have to search far and wide in the Westminster system of government to find a leader of a governing party who can accept so much rebuke from backbenchers. Mr Christie may wind up being called the Neville Chamberlain of Bahamian politics when it is all said and done, he just can’t get it right lately. His legacy is in serious trouble.

He may want to deny it but the Renward Wells affair is a serious threat to his leadership. If he is unable or unwilling to fire Mr Wells, then it means that the young turks in the PLP have won and Mr Christie and other party elders are just marking time until the next convention or until one of his own members moves for a vote of no confidence. He was unable to fire Andre Rollins and had his DPM do it while he was out of town.

While Mr Christie has been sulking over the abuses hurled at him by the new blood he brought into the PLP, the reinvention of the FNM, has been happening right before his eyes.

The Leader of the Opposition, Dr Hubert Minnis has been introducing Bahamians to a new style of political leadership, principle, committed, thoughtful leadership that this generation of Bahamian demands and deserves.

Dr Minnis doesn’t need the blustery “my way or the highway” approach to politics as Mr Ingraham, nor the high sounding convoluted speech craft of Mr Christie, he speaks in plain simple English for every Bahamian to understand.

Mr Christie understood him clearly when he said he was not prepared to support the hastily put together, poorly prepared and poorly presented enabling legislation for the Referendum.

He never said he withdrew his support for the Referendum, he quietly and simply said the Bills were inadequate and Mr Christie and our highly regarded former Attorney General Sean McSweeney had to go back to the drawing board.

If the referendum fails or succeeds, it’s on Mr Christie who was for the Referendum in 2002 before he was against it. Mr Minnis for his part continues to stand for the principle of equality and fair play for Bahamian men and women and their spouses and children.

For Mr Christie, it’s time for rhetoric to meet reality. The next two and half years are going to be tough on him. His government has passed landmark legislation for a new VAT tax regime. Mr Minnis believes the country and the working class Bahamians are not ready for new taxes when there is almost a half a billion dollars in real property taxes uncollected and probably uncollectable, and mostly owed by persons who can afford to pay, like Ishmael Lightbourne, the tax expert who failed to keep up with his own taxes on a lavish home out West. VAT will need an army of experts to get it right and so far we haven’t seen them. It will fall hardest on the residents of Pinewood Gardens, Doris Johnson Estates, Montell Heights, Nassau Village who now pay some of the highest electricity rates and gas taxes in the hemisphere.

Mr Christie heads a party that is still using the old PLP playbook of the seventies and eighties which decreed an “all for me baby” system that looked out for a narrow elite at the expense of the average Bahamian. The Renward Wells affair reeks of that, so does the license for oil exploration in the Bahamas.

Dr Minnis in a straightforward and firm way is saying that the Bahamas needs a better way.

M THOMPSON

Nassau,

August 28, 2014.