The Tribune

EDITOR, The Tribune.

This in reply to “The Graduate”, editorial letter 8th Feb 2017.

As Ebenezer Scrooge angrily asked Marley’s Ghost, in Charles Dickens “A Christmas Carol”, “ Who are You?” “What are you?” and when the spectre asks him, “Why do you doubt your senses?” Scrooge scoffs that “...a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheat. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There’s more gravy than grave about you, whatever you are!”

That was precisely my feeling, as I read the lambast of this lady/man/child/robot, in this morning’s Tribune’s editorial pages.

I don’t have much truck with snipers in foxholes, but The Graduate’s racist rant should not go unchallenged I think.

Majority Rule Day MRD came at a huge and enduring price to the Bahamian people, and was only achieved by the similar garbage that you still spout today. The white man enslaved you for 300 years. The white man is the reason that you have nothing. The white man has stolen your birthright. Notwithstanding 50 years of Majority Rule the white man is still the bogey man. The Bahamas is however almost unique, in the Caribbean/Atlantic where there is a serious racial divide based on one’s skin colour, and sometimes even one’s hue or degree of blackness or whiteness. You don’t find it in Jamaica, nor Barbados, Bermuda, nor most of the Lesser Antilles. That was how Lynden Pindling was able to seize power, and subsequently the Treasury, and the people believed what their Messiah had told them.

When the majority were voting for the white man, prior to 1967, there were undoubtedly incentives offered and taken, perhaps starting with the four shilling note, and then a one pound note, and ultimately a five pound note. But the Black politicians learned quickly, that the majority black man would sell his future for a couple of bucks, and every election since 1967, including that one, there was always talk of vote buying, with many, many schemes of verification. Floating ballots seemed to be one of the more popular, but there certainly was a variety, including “I come to vote fa ma Antie, Cuz she gat swingin in da head”.

What constantly irks me personally, however, is that as much as is made of Majority Rule Day, and it is a PLP thing for sure, is that as I drive around Nassau today, after the PLP “celebrating” the fiftieth anniversary of MRD, the Bahamian people still walk from their modest homes, to the water pumps that the white man (dare I say Colonialists) put there for them, back in the day. The out houses also are in full utility, in most of the black neighbourhoods, and I can only wonder “what has the Majority Black Elected Members done for the Majority Black Population” ? And particularly this year, on the fiftieth anniversary of MRD, the country had just had its Sovereign Credit Rating pegged as JUNK. But they still celebrated the day!

Perhaps you putting us in the same basket with South Africa was deliberate, but just Google “South African Sovereign Credit Rating”:

Fitch Ratings has downgraded its outlook for South Africa’s sovereign credit rating to negative from stable on November 25th and affirmed the country’s ...

Nov 6, 2016 ... In this case, “junk” refers to a downgrade of South Africa’s sovereign credit rating to below investment grade as the G-20 country has been ...

Nov 25, 2016 ... JOHANNESBURG - Credit ratings firm Moody’s Investors Service kept South Africa’s sovereign rating unchanged at Baa2 on Friday, two levels ...

Dec 2, 2016 ... South Africa received a reprieve as S&P left its assessment of the nation’s foreign -currency debt unchanged at one level above junk, while ...

So yes, I guess we are in good company with South Africa. We may just have hit JUNK before them, by a few weeks.

And this is all after successive majority black skinned politicians have been ruling the black skinned populace these last fifty years.

So happy you didn’t bring up Zimbabwe. There are about two thousand white people left in this once extremely prosperous country and its currency is no longer accepted by anyone, including its majority black population.

As my old friend Stafford Morrison often used to paraphrase St. Paul, in his second letter to the Corinthians: “Now bullah ya know I don’t suffer fools gladly”.

Go res’ yaself, Graduate.

BRUCE G. RAINE

Nassau,

February 9, 2017.