The Tribune

FRED MITCHELL, appointed to the Senate after being rejected by the Fox Hill people he had represented in the House of Assembly for 15 years, recently made his political position very clear in a bitter statement.

“I can’t speak for the Progressive Liberal Party,” Mr Mitchell told a branch meeting in Bimini on August 2, “but let me tell you what my personal position is: he’ll not get no apology from me, except this one. I want to apologise to Lynden Pindling for allowing this country to be turned over to a set of gangsters dressed up in white gowns calling themselves a legitimate government of the Bahamas … that’s what I want to apologise for.”

Mr Mitchell quickly made his position clear after Prime Minister Dr Hubert Minnis, invited the PLP to apologise to the Bahamian people for their mismanagement of their country for the past five years. An angry and typically bitter Fred Mitchell, whose life’s ambition was one day to be the prime minister of the Bahamas, was now reserving his apologies for a man he had, at one time, dismissed as irrelevant to the future of this country. “It is time,” he had said in 1990, after burning the Constitution and forming his own political party, “that the Bahamian people consign him (Sir Lynden) to the scrap heap of history.”

This was the same Lynden Pindling to whom he now wants to apologise.

The PLP of that era dismissed Mr Mitchell with the bitterest of rebukes, condemning him for his “unjustifiable and scathing attack’” on Sir Lynden, their prime minister. “Mr Mitchell,” they said, “has been acting like a spoilt brat in recent months and as such he deserves a serious spanking.”

The PLP Council of that day reminded Mr Mitchell that the PLP had given him “every opportunity to come to the forefront in this country”.

The party, it stated, “put the utmost confidence in Mr Mitchell in a number of tangible ways, including letting him handle the Broadcasting Corporation of the Bahamas, Bahamas Information Services and editing the party’s newspaper.

“No less a person than the Prime Minister himself,” said the PLP Council of 1990, “took Mr Mitchell into his full confidence. But what was Mr Mitchell’s response? A complete right about face. Desertion in the face of the enemy.”

Mr Mitchell was given a sound scolding for burning the constitution in the public square and sending its ashes to Sir Lynden. “Nothing,” said the PLP Council, “in the line of secular documents can be more sacred than the country’s constitution. Mr Mitchell advocated destroying it. Clearly by extension he is promoting anarchy and national upheaval.” The Council then dismissed him as a “little fellow who should be watched very closely and avoided like the plague.”

Over the years, Mr Mitchell has worn many faces. In 1983 as an independent senator, having split with the PLP, then flirting with the FNM, he suggested that to solve the Haitian immigration problem, the Bahamas should mount a military attack on Haiti to remove its unstable government, and replace it with one friendly to Bahamian interests. He made his pitch in a speech to the Rotary Club of South East Nassau. Of course, no one took such a reckless adventure seriously.

And now he is confused. He believes that the PLP are at risk of reversing themselves “to a pre-1967 period. So that’s the fear I have,” he added. “So I apologise to the man who has gone on above because we have some work to do to get back to where we were.”

We wonder what Mr Mitchell means by wanting to get back to “where we were” when his record makes it clear that “where we were” was a most uncomfortable time for him. During that period he was climbing the wall, forming his party and burning the constitution to get out.

In his ambition to become prime minister, he has taken a most circuitous route with decisions that have completely defeated his objective and sidelined him.

In a press release yesterday, addressed to Dame Joan Sawyer, the first woman to become Chief Justice of the Bahamas and President of the Court of Appeal, who dismissed him this week as beneath her contempt, he brushed her aside as “not relevant to the times.” He recommended that she “go gently into that good night.”

“Your services,” he concluded, “ are no longer needed now.”

Is it not time for Mr Mitchell to take his own advise and bid the world of politics “adieu”?

Bahamians today are quite capable of charting their own future without his bitter interference.