The Tribune

By NICOLE BURROWS

Oh, I get it now. The National Development Plan (NDP) Vision 2040 ... will be complete in 2040. Got it. Thanks.

Said to be focused on four pillars - Economy, Governance, Social Policy, and (the Built and Natural) Environment - this plan, I expect, after all the time and money spent preparing it, will be an instructive manual (containing an elaborate but precise strategy) of how to grow and operate this country, enveloping the most concerning issues with explicit methods of finding our way out of them.

I do not expect the NDP 2040 to be a random narration, reiteration or regurgitation of problems or a wish list of unattainable ideals.

The woman at the helm of the NDP is a smart woman. I attended the College of The Bahamas with her, and I know her to be pleasant, diligent, responsible and exceedingly intelligent. I have no doubt she has much to contribute to the guts of this NDP. But, my fear is that the target for the NDP keeps moving, and it will keep moving. Because our problems in this nation are so many and varied, by the time the planners think the plan is complete enough to help answer the problems in practice, it would have already begun to expire. What may seem feasible now or tomorrow may very well not be by the time the NDP group reaches the first stages of plan implementation.

Khaalis Rolle, Minister of State for Investments, says, after missing the first deadlines, that the NDP is “a working, living, document” and no further deadlines will be given for its completion (is this becoming a trend with the current administration?) If so, by that definition, the NDP could conceivably change every day it exists, ie, theoretically, you - they - could actually never finish writing it.

Zika contagion

Two recent news stories on ABC News were published online. The first, on September 13, was captioned ‘CDC Still Stumped by Mystery Case in Utah’, and the second article, released on September 15, was captioned ‘Zika Virus Found in Eyes of Adult Patients, Study Finds’.

The cases referenced in these stories are eye-opening … pun intended.

Essentially, they suggest a method of contagion previously unknown or unconfirmed, such that a patient with Zika can spread it to another person if that person comes in contact with fluids from the patient’s eyes.

It is not clear whether fluids means tears or discharge. It is not clear whether contact means touch or aspiration. It is also not clear whether the Zika patient with contagious eye fluid would have had an extremely high saturation of the virus in their system and/or had the virus for a lengthy time.

When you consider the number of unknowns and the unknown possibilities for the spread of Zika, it is disturbing, particularly when you have a $2 million plus annual budget (as is the case in the Bahamas) to fight a disease that you don’t even understand. I’m not saying our medical professionals are incompetent, but we certainly don’t operate an international standard scientific research lab to keep knowledge through experimentation ever flowing.

I am still waiting to hear the health minister’s and chief medical officer’s comments on this latest update on the method of contagion of the Zika virus. As usual, there are crickets, and I fully expect an ‘after the fact’ response and some declarations of ‘having no knowledge’ of and expressing a ‘need to verify’ this information. For their convenience (and yours), these findings were published in the Center for Disease Control’s (CDC’s) Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, and the Journal for the American Medical Association Ophthalmology.

Nation of slaves

In the aftermath of the Sandals nolle prosequi, whereby two Sandals Resort executives were excused from a labour dispute at the hand of the Attorney General Allyson Maynard-Gibson, Trade Union Congress president Obie Ferguson and others are apparently just now seeing that the Bahamas government places foreign interests above Bahamians’ interests.

I fail to understand their surprise. That’s the model of the larger tourism industry. Why is Mr Ferguson surprised? Surely this is feigned astonishment … about as feigned as the request by union leaders for the Prime Minister to relieve the Attorney General of her duties because she signed the nolle without disclosing she had intended to do so.

On ‘The Revolution’ radio show, a guest - activist attorney Romi Ferreira - referenced the descent of Bahamians into a nation of disrespected slaves. Surely he is not also just now seeing this?

Look (and listen) around you. It feels like a good half or more of the population is borderline illiterate, poorly educated, criminally-minded, with poor work ethic, politically rabid, low on income, low on opportunity, minimally qualified, in poor health from self-induced and environmental illness, habits, diets … they don’t seem like an abused, abandoned, trapped people? Living on a 21 mile by seven mile plantation? You think it just happened overnight? Those acclaimed forefathers were so attached to their history that they have successfully repeated it by inflicting it upon their people’s future.

On the same radio show the host asked a question the other day that made me think. I like when people can make me think, even though I may not agree with them on other things. I listen to this show whenever I can because, fundamentally, I believe the host and I want the same thing for our country: an incredible change in thinking and doing that moves us into a position of limitless opportunity for prosperity of character and everything else that flows from that.

He wanted to know why Bahamians are so passive.

And I want to answer that question for him, with the following four points:

Slavery - a conditioned mental poverty that has turned into a real mental poverty. A belief that we are made to suffer … suffer loss, or anything really, for peace sake, etc, and solidifying a low, if not the lowest, rank on the totem poles constructed by others and by ourselves. So we suffer … passively.

Religion - a big part of the slavery/slave-owner/suffering experience. Because we suffer(ed) loss and poverty, it must be ‘God’s will’ and therefore ‘He will take care of it’, so we don’t have to do anything but sit and wait. Ergo, passive.

Tourism - we bow to the dollar, particularly the dollar of the foreign money holder. A continuation of servile behaviour, combined with laziness cultivated in the midst of false abundance. No one expected the tourism good times to slow or end and no one prepared for it; now everything that was always a problem, but shielded from view, is now painfully visible while we sit by and watch. Passive.

No revolution - no fight for liberty. Our ‘independence’ was an easy liberty from the British. I often wonder what would have happened if the British had told us ‘no’... No, you cannot ride on the coattail of Martin Luther King Jr. If the British had said no to our separation from them, and we had something to fight for on account of it, maybe we would be stronger and bolder instead of weaker and - passive.

Union discord

Sorry to say it, but nowhere is the conditioned slave mentality more obvious than among the union organisations. I heard another radio host say recently that union members should be more willing to make sacrifices to improve labor relations in the Bahamas. That is amusing.

Union members don’t join unions for sacrifice or the improvement of labour relations in the Bahamas. They join unions to gain benefits of collective bargaining. It’s the first thing people talk about when you get a job and they ask you if you joined the union. Banking, savings and loans, low interest rates, credit cards, and health insurance benefits … that’s why people join unions in the Bahamas. The rest is winin’ and rum in the Labour Day street parade.

Mandatory voting

Voting - and registering to vote - should be compulsory in the Bahamas. If it were, Bahamians might take the governance of themselves and their country more seriously.

They might feel a unified responsibility to make the choice to elect a sensible government that would work more in the interest of the people, as opposed to the types and methods of government we’ve had since the 1960s. With mandatory registration and voting, the average citizen would automatically have a more vested interest in participatory government. With the requirement to vote comes the requirement to be educated about the vote, to understand the voting process and why it is so important for every citizen to be a part of it.

Mandatory voting makes government more answerable, more accountable … if I as a citizen have to vote responsibly, then you as a government have to govern responsibly.

If voting was mandatory in the Bahamas, it is very likely that more people would vote and there would be a greater chance that the resulting government would be more representative of the people ... all the people. And because citizens would be required to vote anyway, their votes are less susceptible to $200-wrapped t-shirt, rum/beer, fridge bribes. And if people have to vote and don’t want to vote, then they have the right to exercise a blank vote if they choose none of the candidates on the ballot. You wouldn’t be forced to vote for one person or the other, you’d be forced to study the vote because it is mandatory, and, if you don’t approve of a candidate, then that is recorded as a ‘none-of-the-above’ choice or a ‘blank’ vote.

You are a citizen first, and all else comes after. You won’t get excused for religious reasons, because you are a citizen before you choose your faith or religion.

Obviously, the elderly, indigent, or ill, and under 18, would not be subject to compulsory voting. For those who can’t physically be there to vote, voting by e-post or proxy would be required, and this option would also be available to elderly, ill, or indigent populations.

Compulsory voting is more than appropriate for a country of less than 400,000 people who already struggle with issues of responsible citizenship and responsible government.

But the key is to intertwine education with universal suffrage ... the aim being for Bahamians to know more and care more about their country, with the exercise of their mandatory vote being the culmination of that knowledge and concern (any illiterate person, unless illiterate to the point of being disabled or mentally incompetent/ill, would be assisted in understanding the vote.)

If voting is mandatory and you don’t vote, you would get a monetary fine, if you have financial means to pay.

Without financial means, you would be fined labour via community service, and a requirement to work an election poll and/or take a class on citizenship and good governance.

Any argument against compulsory voting really only leads to the question of ‘what does not voting result in’? The only outcomes are selfish and certainly not nationalist.

All you end up saying is that there was low voter turnout, people were disenfranchised, and nobody gives a damn about the country.

Your vote is your power, and, if you don’t choose to use it, you risk the welfare of the entire country, yourself included. With that in mind, it may be time to seriously consider the greater benefits of mandatory voting in the Bahamas.

E-mail: nburrows at tribunemedia.net. Facebook and Twitter: @SoPolitiCole