The Tribune

By NICOLE BURROWS

If I hear one more person claiming to want to lead me and my people and can barely knock two letters together to make sense ...

I know not everyone is well-read or well-spoken. I know people who are exceptional in their professions who are not good at speaking, not good at writing, not good at spelling, not good at English, and they are wonderful people.

But if you want to stand in front of the world and represent me and look sensible doing it, you have to know your limitations, come to terms with them and get some training ... or wear an earpiece where someone can whisper the corrections to you wherever you have to make a public presentation.

Understand it is not because I think you are less of a person if you don’t have these skills, but if you make me cringe with your written or spoken word blood bath, I guarantee others are cringing too. And it’s not because we think you’re stupid, but it’s because we feel shame. We feel ashamed that others are laughing at you, for good reason ... a reason that could have been managed had you admitted your deficiencies and sought to do something about them.

When others are laughing at you, who have zero sympathy in the world of ruthless politics, it’s not just something you can dismiss. Opportunities are denied because people find you laughable. You couldn’t possibly be serious if every sentence you speak has a few slaughtered words in it, which are not due to a foreign language barrier. When people don’t take you seriously, doors get slammed in your face ... or maybe they never even get opened. And so you fail before you even get to start at getting me and my people a seat at the table.

And yes, this is all attributable to the man who recently said “The people knows”, repeatedly, in a news interview. (And yes, I will continue to say and write “the person who” and not “the person that” as is so common in the new bastardised English).

• • •

Cloud Carib - have you heard of them before? - has an advertisement running in the local papers to fill several positions, including that of Chief Commercial Officer. The company calls itself “a leading provider for cloud services within the Caribbean region. The business has had tremendous success over the past couple of years, in terms of revenue and customer growth and is anticipating increasing demand in 2016 and beyond.”

I really hope I don’t know anyone who is a part of this company, because I’d hate to step all over their toes, but the very first job requirement is that the applicant must have a minimum of “five years experience in Asia Pacific (Mainland China is preferred)”.

Wait. What?

Who is this ad for employment geared towards? How many Bahamians do you know with five years of work experience in mainland China?

The second requirement is for the applicant to have acquired over 15 years of experience in “executive leadership in internet or cloud service industries”. Has the cloud service industry been around for more than 15 years?

After a few more reasonable criteria, another requirement is “experience successfully building startup business to multiple millions in revenues”.

But I thought they already had tremendous success in terms of revenue growth.

• • •

The Ministry of Education - and the Education Loan Authority - finally decided to correct its advertisement regarding the provision of student loan “relief in the form of Principle and Interest reduction to all borrowers” to “Principal and Interest”.

I suppose it’s to be expected, when the State of the Nation Report from the National Development Plan (NDP) Secretariat recently revealed just how uneducated a people we are. We are constantly rewarded for regression and inadequacy, which is why students can graduate high school more than half the time with just a leaving certificate and aspire to hold the highest office in the land but can’t spell or speak to save a life.

The report further stated that government employees, especially in the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Health, are not properly scrutinised for job performance, and therefore productivity is down.

Well, that’s probably just one quarter of the reason? There is a lack of skill and qualification on the part of these employees who are supposed to be productive. How can they be productive when they have no or few skills and are ill-equipped?

There is, further, a lack of transparency and accountability even within the units which comprise the entire organisation and therefore an endemic corruption, such that no one has to be made responsible and their jobs are secured.

And there is a gross lack of resources to remedy the problem of ill-equipped staff, so where exactly is the productivity expected?

The NDP report suggests these unproductive people are “unemployable without intervention”, ie if you’re unemployable you’re screwed, and we’re all screwed if more than half the people being educated in The Bahamas are terminally unemployable. The NDP report suggests better training is needed, but remedial training can’t fix this gargantuan problem quickly enough, which is why foreign investors and Bahamian companies are bypassing Bahamians in the hiring process, unless for low-skilled work, or unless they can grab young Bahamians fresh out of college, to assure the most bang for their buck.

In light of this, either education dollars have been spent on the wrong things with the wrong priorities and built insecurely on a failed structure, or the students are simply unteachable. Which is it?

The saddest description yet of our people, our plight, and our prospects in the whole State of the Union/NDP report is the “working poor”. If productivity is down, consumption is down, investment is down, and social spending is up, that equals a welfare state if ever there was one. All you get thereafter is the non-working poor. I submit we are well on our way to that.

And certainly a forced minimum wage can’t improve the problem of poverty because employers will naturally seek to reduce the labour force in their employ in order to offset the mandatory increase in wages. So how and who does that help?

If in the public service you are inundated with under-performing staff, and you don’t want to completely dismiss the under-productive or unproductive, then get them out of where they are and redeploy them into other parts of government service. Conduct national testing in basic functionalities, measured by an international standard, and whatever examinations the under-performing pass assign them a job with a matching skill level and wage, and increase overall efficiency in the public service.

The ministries are not “well-monitored”, per the report, because they are not well-led, well-governed or well-staffed. It is a problem that is impossible to fix if you don’t undertake a drastic measure such as the one prescribed above.

I blame decades of tourism, weak and slothful government, encouraging Bahamians over the years to cater to others when they should have been catering to themselves and their self-development first. Bahamians have an unnatural, unhealthy reliance on the guarantee of security in tourism and government jobs without putting in much effort if any at all. And at what cost?

I wonder how Prime Minister Christie feels to preside over this ominous news ... and this particular time in the history of The Bahamas.

• • •

In response to the US State Department’s 2015 Country Report on Human Rights Practices, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs says to the US authorities that they ought not to rely on anything told to them other than by our government agencies and via official channels ... as if the Bahamas government has a track record of unbiased reporting on itself.

Listen, the masses aren’t hollering about corruption everywhere because they’re bored or have nothing else to say. Everyone knows someone in The Bahamas who is a part of some corrupt practice at home, at work, at church, in government. And the mere fact that talk of corruption is widespread, however anecdotal our government agencies may find it, there is fire behind the smoke. And if our government officials think differently, sealed out of the public reach in their public offices with stale coffee, Rich Tea biscuits and excess air conditioning then they are delusional. You believe first what you see and feel, not what you are told. I look forward to the day when there is evidence of it all laid out cleanly in the morning papers.

• • •

In Leslie Miller’s outburst about the US State Department report, did you catch a whiff of an admission of crookedness? He says “if Bahamians are crooked, most people who make you crooked are the damn Americans who you deal with. They are the ones who teach you how to be crooked.”

He says you must do what is necessary “to keep allegiance so you can win again”.

So basically, yes, the government is corrupt and it’s okay because the people made it that way ... them and the Americans, presumably.

Well, if Miller is right, which he probably is, that “You help those who help you ... and that is just the way it is and there is nothing we can do about it,” then we, my fellow and beloved Bahamians, are royally screwed into oblivion.

Send email to nburrows @tribunemedia.net.