The Tribune

By DR IAN BETHELL-BENNETT

As violence in our society explodes – three more have been murdered in less then 48 hours – it seems that we are content to allow people to be murdered based on their social standing. We are also happy to continue to not give people equal access to legal rights.

We find ourselves as society absolutely divided and irreparably fragmented so that anything that happens is questioned on the grounds of its origin. Government is viewed as untrustworthy and so anything they present, even when it is in the benefit of the nation and not just the state, tends to be struck down. The fact that political bipartisanism is absent from any discussion or lived experience acts as a stumbling bloc to national progress. The party loyalty stops the country from surviving.

Government neutrality must be maintained. In part, perceived government bias also helped to distance the electorate from voting for equal access to legal rights. In the administration of any country, especially in this governance context, government must be perceived as being neutral. Even when government has a proverbial horse in the race, they must not big up their own horse They cannot be seen or appear to be acting in the interest of any one party over any other party. They must therefore never back one argument over another. Their empowering of the “Yes” campaign served to undermine the energy, if there had been any to the “Yes” vote. It created an appearance of bias and so undermined the democratic process.

The process towards the referendum was terribly flawed. There was a horrible lack of explanation and public awareness building prior to the real crux of the battle that ensued. The battle really roared over what was not being discussed and what was not on the ballots as apposed to what was. Everything in the public sphere began to turn on the suspicion that government was trying to fool the public. Of course, much of this was founded in the lack of trust established through the disaster of the last referendum that was really an opinion poll, but the public was not made adequately aware of this. When the public stated their preference for gaming to remain illegal, which was ignored by the government that chose to legalise numbers. The government thereby chose to ignore the public’s voice. This leads to a lack of public trust.

The role of the government and/or the commission in educating the public was far too limited. It should have been more far reaching and provided wider participation on the community level that was not limited to members of the commission. Better efforts to explaining the language of the intended amendments needed to have been made. The language of the bills was extremely confused and horribly impenetrable. This served to create an even less open appearance and further created mistrust.

We have become so mired in politics that we cannot seem to understand that referenda are not political. When this matter was bought to the public in 2002 it was used, once again, as a political weapon to show the government that they were not in charge. Given that the last time this was raised the then prime minister stated that whomever won the referendum would win the general election. The people rejected that completely and given the non-transparent nature of the subject matter itself, the whole thing was rejected. The bad taste from the current government’s withdrawal of its support for the referendum has remained. The reality of the sell-out, as the people see it, continues to undermine the public trust. The government’s push to back the “Yes” came far too late. The damage to the electoral process was completed years ago.

Flawed communication and the appearance that this was a PLP thing also undermined the entire process. When the results did not come in until well after the fact, this also helped to show the public that their distrust of government was warranted. Moreover, the party chairman should have at no time become involved in the referendum process. He had no authority in calling the vote a defeat as that was the job of the leader of government. The leader of government is not the leader of the party. The lack of transparency from the Parliamentary Registrar has furthered the idea that the process is flawed and that something rotten was afoot.

One thing we are fully aware of is that the system is misogynist. Many men and women, too, argued that they did not support women having equitable access to legal rights as men. They felt and saw nothing wrong with expressing it publicly that Bahamian women who marry foreign men should be sent to their husbands’ homes and not be allowed to pass on their citizenship in the same way married Bahamian men could.

Further revelatory was that there were obvious pockets of votes in favour of giving women with access to legal equity. Many of these were not revealed until days after the vote had been counted and were never announced on radio. This worked to further shroud the entire process in nontransparent party politics with an intent to fool the voting public. Those “Yes” areas also served to illuminate that most folks in this great Bahamaland did not see themselves in any way as being affected by this referendum. It had nothing to do with their cultural reality. They do not know anyone who would marry a foreign man or move to a foreign country to have children.

Obviously, there was no connection between the high-flying bills that would make changes to laws that do not obviously affect the lives of 95 per cent of the population, according to their understanding. In their lives, mothers own their children. They do not share that with fathers because the fathers are not there. We are talking about a sector of society that functions as a matriarchy. They do not marry, they are limited in their level of education and they have not experienced the world outside of New Providence. These are the people who care little if Albany leaves New Providence because it is too far for them to care about. They may be exposed to cable television, but their diet is limited to “Bad Girls Club”, VH1 and a few soap operas. Many folks have never been to a Family Island, except perhaps for a regatta, and worse, have never even been to Miami.

We seem to expect to the country to function as a first-world nation built on seriously under-developed education and poor social development. The lack of true or good governance has continued to undermine the success of the democracy. Government seems to have missed this reality completely and tried to build a mansion on shifting sands of poor education, misogyny and a fundamentally controlled group filled with hatred who hold no desire to progress beyond what they know because we have taught them to be thus.