The Tribune

EDITOR, The Tribune,

I heard and read with amazement Prime Minister Perry Christie’s much-publicized speech in the Cayman Islands about working towards a corruption-free Caribbean and his citing the Bahamas as an example of progress in this direction.

There is growing speculation in the media – social and traditional – that Mr Christie may be living in an increasingly unreal world of self-delusion.

He seems oblivious to the realities of his and his government’s blunders and what is going on around him. It is as if he is developing a different sense of what is right and wrong in governance from what most rational Bahamians believe.

Or is it that he has become so immersed in the PLP culture of entitlement and exceptionalism that he is now thinking like former US President Richard Nixon when he told David Frost that “When the President does it, it isn’t illegal”? So a thing might be objectively wrong but when the PLP Leader and other PLPs do it, it is not wrong!

For instance, Mr Christie has utterly failed to grasp the point that it was wrong for him – “as Prime Minister” – to pressure a financial institution that was using due process of law with regard to a delinquent mortgage.

Bear in mind that Mr Christie, by his own account, did not offer, as a friend, to make arrangements for the payment of any of the arrears on Ishmael Lightbourn’s mortgage.

No, he wanted the bank to know that he was talking to them “as Prime Minister”, with all the weight of his office behind him.

He has similarly failed to see the impropriety of, in the first place, appointing as chief advocate and public educator on a tax matter a man who had not paid his own taxes in 20 years and, in the second place, refusing to remove him from his position after exposure and justifiable public outrage.

Then Mr Christie goes to the Cayman Islands to lecture on corruption-free governance, quoting himself that “it is of the first importance that the Prime Minister and other Ministers of Government observe – and be seen to observe – the highest standards of probity in public life.”

This is the same Perry Christie who – again by his own admission – when he was Leader of the Opposition accepted payment for consultancy services rendered to a company proposing to drill for oil in the Bahamas. In fact he was “handsomely rewarded” for his services to the oil company while waiting to become Prime Minister of the Bahamas!

True, what he did was not illegal, but did Mr Christie tell his listeners in the Caymans how this stacks up with his “highest standards of probity in public life”?

Did he also say if this was his idea of “leading by example”, as he boasted in the Caymans?

Did he say if it would be okay for others to emulate this behaviour? And are others now doing just that?

It is fortunate for Mr Christie, “as prime minister”, that the Bahamian people seem to have become so numbed by abuse that they, the media, the official opposition and right-thinking people in the governing party have not hounded him out of office for his grotesque interpretation of “the highest standards of probity in public life”.

It is, however, very bad and very sad for the country.

DIOGENES

Nassau,

March 29, 2014.