The Tribune

By LARRY SMITH

LIKE others, I spend a lot of time grazing on social media these days. Although you have to wade through muddy water, it is one of the best ways to gauge the opinions of a wide cross-section of Bahamians.

The reaction on social media to Prime Minister Perry Christie’s recent condemnation of Bahamian journalists to the pit of everlasting fire has been a particular joy to watch.

“A war has been declared,” wrote one poster on an FNM-oriented page. “The elephant in the room is whether the media will go where he sent them or go on the attack.”

Well, that’s an easy one. As former BTC marketing director Marlon Johnson posted: “The first rule I was taught in public relations is never go to war unnecessarily with people who buy their ink by the ton.”

That’s a saying often attributed to Mark Twain. However, it is also the case that politicians can sometimes gain traction with their base by picking a fight with the media, so maybe that was Christie’s intent.

Predictably, The Nassau Guardian’s op-ed section on Monday openly referred to the prime minister as “unhinged”, and castigated his “go to hell” remarks for being “extraordinarily disgraceful” and “incomprehensible”.

The PM - a man who loves to be loved - was portrayed as “incredibly thin-skinned, increasingly agitated” and “approaching his breaking point” as events around him spiralled out of control.

Christie’s banishment of judgmental journalists to eternal perdition was (shockingly) given before an audience of working journalists and journalism students at the College of the Bahamas.

His point was that their judgment was not shared by the voters who had elected him over the past 40 years – and those victories demonstrated clearly that he was a great and successful leader. Like the Wizard of Oz, he was instructing them on how to depict his greatness.

However, Punch columnist Nicki Kelly disagreed with this view. She thought the PM’s remarks showed “how worried he is about the influence (of journalists) on a disenchanted electorate … A new breed of young Bahamians will no longer tolerate obfuscation by their government.”

Meanwhile, Tribune publisher Eileen Carron – whose newspaper broke the story – was concerned that journalists are unfortunately in the same boat with the politicians, and if the boat loses its way both are headed straight for the bottomless pit together.

“We all want a better country,” she added. “To achieve that we have to demand zero tolerance of wrongdoing. And what better place to start than at the top? Our leaders have to set an example, and we have to stop making excuses for them.”

But a quick look at Facebook showed that the excuse manufacturers were already hard at work.

On the one hand, Christie was presented as the nation’s saviour, a well-

intentioned chieftain straining under the weight of incredible responsibility, and justifiably lashing out at his unfair tormentors.

“I guess he said enough is enough,” posted long-time apologist Forrester Carroll. “Given all he has done to rescue the nation from the brink of financial disaster, yet all he can get is their negativity. He is human, and humans get tired of ungrateful people. The Lord Jesus Christ put him back in office to rescue us.”

On the other hand, doubt was being cast on the veracity of the media reports, implying that the PM’s remarks were somehow distorted and misrepresented by the evil journalists themselves for their own nefarious reasons.

“...if you saw the whole sequence (of what the PM said), you’d agree that the way the reporter summed up the statement justifies the PM’s notion that they can go there,” gloated ZNS news director Andrew Burrows, who cleverly did not include the remark in the national newscast. “Paraphrasing is not reporting, especially if it’s wrong.”

The full audio file of what Christie said is readily available on The Tribune’s website. And all the published reports I read were exact reproductions of the words the prime minister used.

Of course, Christie is not the only politician to have condemned the press for unfair reporting. Both Hubert Ingraham and Sir Lynden Pindling had their own difficulties, and occasionally vented in public. Pindling once tried to introduce a gag order on The Tribune in Parliament.

But Christie’s problem is two-fold. First, once he gets going he finds it hard to stop talking, and his long-running soliloquies provide a lot of grist for the mill. Second, his government is patently resistant to any level of transparency and accountability, which flies in the face of modern trends.

The pending Freedom of Information law has become a code for greater transparency and accountability. And Christie, at the COB event, touted this long-delayed legislation as an important plank of his legacy, promising that a revised Bill would soon be “brought” – presumably to Parliament.

“When the historians look at this government,” Christie said fulsomely, “notwithstanding what the naysayers say, there will never be any to match it in the history of this country (in terms of) what we are going to do, the legislative agenda, the reforms that we will put in place.”

But soaring rhetoric notwithstanding, it is clear that the entire record of the prime minister’s present term has been characterised by a reluctance to provide information or access on key public interest issues, and a studied failure to follow established protocols.

From the BEC “reform” process, to the confidential BTC agreement, to major contracts issued without public tender, to the shelving of costly audits of public agencies, to the infamous and mysterious letter of intent, to the multi-million-dollar BAMSI fiasco, to the Alfred Gray “judicial interference” affair – it has been one scandal after another with the government that Christie leads forever scrambling to cover its tracks and avoid consequences for anyone involved.

From our heated outpost in Hades, we wish to advise the prime minister that he could better secure his legacy by dealing with these matters effectively instead of punting them.

• What do you think? Send comments to lsmith@tribunemedia.net or visit www.bahamapundit.com.

Sir Arthur strikes the right note on constitutional equality

Retired Governor-General Sir Arthur Foulkes gave a brilliant short speech on gender equality last week.

Sir Arthur, one of the framers of our 1973 independence constitution, was a leading activist during the civil rights era of the 1960s. He told Bahamians there were times when “citizens seeking equality and progress must organise, and even demonstrate, in order to bring pressure to bear on their elected representatives.”

Sir Arthur likened the present situation in the Bahamas to the time when civil rights leaders sought to empower US President Lynden Johnson “to help him to convince more of white America of the need for a Voting Rights Act, and to push recalcitrant senators and congressmen to vote for the historic legislation.”

The Constitutional Amendment Bills now before Parliament seek to correct two instances where the Constitution discriminates against women in matters of citizenship, and one instance where it discriminates against men, also in a matter of citizenship.

The Bills must be passed by Parliament and then approved in a referendum to become law. But the government has been delaying the measure due to opposition from a handful of MPs, who claim to be responding to their constituents.

One of the Bills would eliminate all discrimination based on sex in our laws, and it would prohibit the possibility of Parliament passing in the future any law discriminating on the basis of sex.

“I believe I share with you the firm conclusion that, despite all the talk – some of it bordering on hysterical – there is really not one good reason why all four of these Bills should not be passed by Parliament and approved by the people in a referendum. To accord all citizens of a democracy equality regardless of sex is – plainly, simply and clearly – the right thing to do.”

Right on, Sir Arthur.

• The full text of Sir Arthur Foulkes’ speech can be found HERE