The Tribune

By NICOLE BURROWS

The sympathetic, empathetic me - which, in spite of my sharp tongue, does exist - wants to feel sorry for Hubert Minnis, seeing the shock and upset on his face on the floor of Parliament when the “subversive seven” defied him, and hearing his recent public statements that amount to desperate pleas to keep what he perceives as his leadership of the Free National Movement (FNM).

But I can’t feel sorry for him. He invited the doom upon himself. He asked for all of this turmoil, not because he bothered to throw his hat in the political ring in the first instance, but because he has clung on to leadership when he really should have walked away long ago.

Minnis was told repeatedly by the public, by FNM supporters, by FNM members, by FNM parliamentarians, that his leadership was ... is ... flawed at best, pathetically weak at worst. But he chose to refuse to see it. And even if he might have thought of those judgements bearing any amount of truth no matter how small, he is still too stubborn to accept that as a reality.

Minnis is in a broken marriage with leadership of the FNM. His FNM children want him to stay in that marriage. He feels he is obligated to stay, that it is unholy of him to leave his ordination as party leader and his vows to his FNM wife. He believes his FNM wife needs him to survive, but in spite of their being poorly suited, or like the religious people like to say, unequally yoked, Minnis and his FNM struggle to stay together. I mean they literally struggle. With each other. They fight to remain a unit, when it is clear they are, for all involved, better off apart.

But Minnis doesn’t get it. He’s never gotten it. He will never get it. And now it doesn’t even matter. As a viable political leader, he is rubbish. He has made a mockery of his own self and whatever leadership ability he thought he had. His unsuitability as a leader was and still is about more than his inability to properly communicate with words; he is incapable of even convincingly acting the part of a leader.

And for every bit of resistance he has met along the way, Minnis has never taken it as constructive criticism. He clapped back. He always claps back. He’s like a child in a game; when he’s losing he snaps back with some silly retort that makes neither sense nor difference.

Any amount of leadership skill he may have had could not hold the party together, whatever its issues, so, after all that has transpired in the past week, which Bahamian is going to seriously think he can hold their country together?

I wish that he would just go quietly and save himself from eternal shame, but he just won’t. So, whatever is coming his way politically, I say let it come.

I don’t know what sense it makes to be so proudly in charge of failure, but he seems to think there’s merit or credit there. Maybe we can allow him to live out his delusion. It might be the only political thing he has left.

Loretta Butler-Turner, in stark contrast, is not a leader like Minnis; that is, unless she planned this coup since the FNM convention and this is the reason why she changed her mind about leading the party back then. Perhaps it was evident to her at that time just what she was up against in the FNM to challenge Minnis’ leadership, being jeered at on stage by a rabid group of Minnis faithfuls. But she has shown us all that, clearly, she can be rabid too. And now the scrapping of Minnis and Butler-Turner in our back yard has produced a stinking mess.

As a woman, I’d like to support Mrs Butler-Turner, but I can’t support her only because she’s a woman.

She is a stronger personality than Minnis, a more confident person than he amongst political rivals, but I don’t think that makes her a good leader. There is a certain unpredictability about Butler-Turner as a leader that is unsafe. I don’t believe she can be relied upon to be consistent in her efforts. I applaud her (and her six compatriots) for exercising what has been affirmed as a democratic right to challenge their own leader, but other than becoming the Leader of the Official Opposition in the House of Assembly, I don’t think that challenge gets her anything. If her objective was to rid the FNM of Minnis, then maybe she has succeeded.

In fact, she may have gone a step further and rid the country of the FNM, because Minnis is most obviously now no leader, and there is no other person fit to lead the party out of the darkness that enshrouds it.

In the aftermath of their ‘no-confidence’ action, Loretta Butler-Turner and her colleagues couldn’t possibly expect to remain representatives of the FNM in Parliament, even if they remain members of the party.

Given his snapback, clapback way, Minnis will see to it, if it’s the last thing he does before he puts his political leadership desires to permanent sleep, that Butler-Turner and the six others never get another FNM nomination.

So what will they do? If any one of them - including Butler-Turner - intends to run for a seat in the next general election, and be taken seriously, they will have to do so as an independent candidate, or a candidate of another political party. I don’t see any of them joining another party, and none of them have the overwhelming support of high level decision-makers of the FNM, Butler-Turner perhaps being the least liked among them. Even if somehow their candidacy was forced upon FNM supporters, it would show as the disunited farce that it is.

Until new players join their team, the FNM is fatally divided, so much so that the current situation in Parliament will never work. How on earth is it supposed to work?

Democratically, Loretta Butler-Turner is now the Leader of the Official Opposition in the House of Assembly. Hubert Minnis is still leader of the FNM, also democratically. They both sit in the House of Assembly, next to each other. Hubert Minnis has two FNM House supporters out of nine - lackeys Turnquest and Wells - and the subversive seven are still members of the FNM. But how in the hell is anything supposed to get accomplished in the House after now, when, effectively, Parliament is divided into three instead of two? And two of the three parts are consumed with fighting one another instead of their own real opposition, the governing party.

All there is is bitterness. Minnis only just called Butler-Turner and her faction a cancer, having already called them rebels and mutineers. And Butler-Turner disappointingly bothered to answer back.

This does not bode well for Minnis or Butler-Turner, or the other six FNMs backing Butler-Turner. This does not bode well for the Bahamian people’s business in Parliament and as such this does not bode well for the Bahamas, at least in the short-term. The current business, which was challenged enough before to be executed, will now be slower if not altogether stalled.

On the up-side, what the Bahamian people will do now and for the next five anticipated months until the next general election is look elsewhere to throw their support. And contrary to widespread hypothesising, it is unlikely to be in the direction of the Progressive Liberal Party (PLP), no matter how many jobs Perry Christie can squeeze out of Baha Mar by Spring 2017.

Watching a PLP administration fumble and fall repeatedly over the last four and a half years has made it clear that party is unsuitable to govern. Now Hubert Minnis and Loretta Butler-Turner have proven that the FNM is also unsuitable to govern The Bahamas.

But, in spite of all of this, it could be the best thing ever for Bahamians. The truth is as clear as day now. The PLP is a failure and unelectable. The FNM is a failure and unelectable. There is no other place for a Bahamian voter to cast her/his vote but to the independent candidates, the Democratic National Alliance (DNA) candidates, or another smaller political organisation’s candidates.

What we end up with as a new government could very easily now be extremely different from what we see today and what we’ve seen for the last two decades. And it would be a welcome change. Never mind the people who say it’s not possible - those who say that they are happy to keep either the FNM or PLP in governance.

So, thank Loretta Butler-Turner and company, and Hubert Minnis, and the PLP, for this much: they just made a case for all sensible Bahamians to vote against them all and take their chances with a newer, cleaner, less-baggaged group of elected representatives in 2017.

The only baggage will be what’s left behind of PLP and FNM mismanagement and implosion. That will be a lot to contend with, let’s not deceive ourselves. But people who mean right by their country will find it an honour to clean up what’s left and discard any ineffective remnants of our first 43 years.

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