The Tribune

By NICOLE BURROWS

WE are a servant society. Our primary reliance on tourism has led us to this place today. This is not a smear campaign against tourism, lest the tourism officials’ knickers become knotted.

As a smaller part of a larger package and probably with more responsible people at the helm in the last four decades, tourism could have been better for us and better to us.

It doesn’t matter how elaborate the National Development Plan (NDP) is or will be, our fate is sealed if Prime Minister Christie’s aim is to create a nation of islands filled with high net worth, high-end resorts, where the average Bahamian can’t afford to stay, or can barely qualify to work at.

What is the NDP supposed to do? Justify why we should stay the course with the current model of tourism?

You can hear from as many people in the Bahamian public as you want by way of surveys. If the end goal is to sign Heads of Agreement (HoAs) with high end promises to high end people, you will never be able to have room in your mind to appreciate or respect the fact that your approach to economic development is entirely wrong.

You question the impact of tourism? Take a closer look. We are accustomed to being spoon-fed, told what to do, not thinking deeply, being limited in innovation, having a heavy reliance on others in every way, including politically, accepting what comes to us and being complacent about what we go after, extreme nonchalance ... all these characteristics that weigh down our growth and our society are a direct offshoot of the fundamental thinking instilled by a servant-based tourism mentality.

What we do first is for others, not for us. It’s been that way since I was a child and our leaders continue to demonstrate that.

The lack of economic diversification with our lot cast in/on tourism is a reason for the lack of educational diversification of our people in order to build a balanced and functional society. If all you think or expect or train them to do is work in the hotels and resorts, you will have no vision to train them in or prepare them for anything else.

But no, we’ll sign some more HoAs every year, take promises, get shat on, walk away with less still for our country’s welfare and so it will go until we are too weak to resist anyone, or until every Bahamian who can get out of The Bahamas will never want to set foot back in.

Bahamians, whether you decide to vote for a modern outlook promised by the Democratic National Alliance, the United Democratic Party, another political party, or for one of many of a large group of independent candidates, please know, whatever you do, it is time to remove the Progressive Liberal Party and the Free National Movement from the leadership of our country.

We will never move forward with what both large political parties have become over recent and not-so-recent years. We have no future, no hope, if they remain in power. They are leading us down a finite road, at the end of which we would have lost any measure of independence that was ever legitimate.

They make a mockery of governance, freedom, progressive leadership, democracy, and of us and of every principle that still holds us together as a people. I beg you – see it before it’s too late.

As I’ve continued my travels, I have encountered yet another young Bahamian in the least likely of places, who very accidentally realised I was from The Bahamas. She told me how she’d been home after college, tried to work there, couldn’t adequately advance her career - in hospitality of all things! - and hence returned to America. Needless to say, I extended an invitation to interview her in the ‘Bahamians Living in the USA’ series.

In the process of talking to her, she also told me that she knew of someone who had opted for a life in one of the coldest, bleakest, furthest places on earth from The Bahamas, just to have a chance at a better life, refusing to return to the stagnant Bahamas.

Our country has been emptying itself of intellectual capital resources for a long time. This process continues and appears to be on the incline. How do we amalgamate these dispersed human resources to improve our Bahamas? How do we get these Bahamian expatriates to care about the development of The Bahamas to the extent that they involve themselves in a more significant way after they have left and set up their lives in other countries?

Does any Bahamian still care to do so, when they are met with fear, rejection, animosity, because they are educated and exposed and dare for five minutes to dream bigger and have more in life?