The Tribune

By NICOLE BURROWS

It is obvious now that Prime Minister Perry Christie has unashamedly built his 2017 election campaign upon drawing contrasts between himself and Free National Movement (FNM) leader Hubert Minnis.

Christie’s aim appears to be to make Minnis seem like the worst possible person you could ever vote for as a leader, mostly on account of his horrendous speaking ability. And we all know it is as horrendous as it is well-documented.

The problem for Christie is that he is failing to recall who put him in office. He is relying on his grassroots supporters, many of whom also have horrendous English skills and speaking ability, to think that it’s actually a real problem to have poor English language habits. People who care about how well Minnis might speak are not generally supporters of Christie’s Progressive Liberal Party (PLP), and they don’t outweigh the number of people who don’t care how Minnis speaks, so why is Christie even wasting his time?

To top it all off, Christie decided that the PLP’s Young Liberals should also be made to understand why voting for basically anyone in the PLP rather than voting for Minnis in the FNM would help to save the English language from being crucified on a regular basis.

Minnis is pretty bad at English. Have I said that enough times? So we’ve established that. And when you think he’s doing better with it and redeeming himself he goes and sticks another dagger in the wound. To his slim credit, though, there is someone almost as bad as he is, on the PLP side. Renardo Curry demonstrated his parity with Minnis in his recent English grammar slaughterhouse on an Our News interview.

Are these people really the best we can do for representing us?

Now, Minnis sucks sour lollipops where speaking is concerned (yes, I said it again). And as a side note, I keep wondering every time he has a verbal explosion how on earth he became a doctor? Don’t you have to pass oral and written exams? And if you can’t speak you probably can’t write?

In any event, Christie decided he is going to go and talk bad about Minnis on a collegiate platform, and in the process of talking about Minnis’ oratorial weaknesses and resulting lack of confidence, Christie very confidently and clearly says ‘camaflouge’. No, that is not my spelling error.

Christie really believes he is a great orator, but what he is is a rambler and his English is only 70 per cent better than Minnis’. I don’t know what’s worse - a potential leader who can’t speak or one who speaks sort of okay and seemingly with authority, yet makes no sense using multiple run-on sentences and no punctuation.

While you debate the answer to that question, someone please give Minnis a vocabulary list, or a thesaurus, or a dictionary, so he can stop over-exposing the word ‘populace’. I know he must be thrilled to know a new word, but geez man, give it a rest.

And while Minnis does that someone can kindly inform Christie that he is not in fact a Bible character so he can quit stealing biblical phraseology like “In the coming days and weeks, there’ll be signs that the time is drawing nigh”, to run his campaign. This man has no shame. I guess if you know your people are already brainwashed you might as well use it to your advantage, huh?

Christie has got to be living in an alternate reality. Because along with his Bible-speak, he also says things like “Politics is about judgement and being able to exercise judgement that wouldn’t frighten people”, a characteristic he suggests Minnis does not possess.

Tell me please, Bahamians, who among you is unafraid after the seeing the results of the judgement, or lack of good judgement, Christie has exercised in the past five years?

Sense and sensitivity

TWO young teen boys, for whatever their mischief that eventually led either or both of them astray, could never deserve to have gunshots to their heads on some track road in a bush as a way to meet their end, could they?

It was a hideous headline that should have made all our stomachs churn with sick, but you had Arnold Forbes (PLP MP) and Marvin Dames (FNM candidate) show up on the scene of the crime to play the parts of concerned politicians running in the next election in the constituency where the boys’ bodies were found.

It should have been the most numbing and sombre scene they had ever set foot upon. Were we, the viewing audience, only provided with the recorded interviews and not cutaways and video filler, we would have been spared the moments both Forbes and Dames were recorded laughing at the scene of the crime. Now, maybe the fault lies with the reporter who said something funny, inappropriately making light of their presence there. But was it necessary to use non-essential footage of these men grinning at the scene of two murdered teenagers to create this news report? How is the public meant to separate the stiff-faced politician from the laughing face interviewees?

And then, Dames is interviewed days later saying that Minister of National Security, Bernard Nottage, is insensitive because he said he is not surprised about the boys’ murders. Really, Mr Dames? Go back and look at yourself grinning on camera, braces reflecting the sunlight, mere feet away from those two dead boys’ bodies and then come back to us for a conversation about insensitivity.

As for Nottage, I have to say, I’m not surprised by his comments. Come on now, we should all be accustomed to Nottage’s dulled, almost muted responses given in all of his interviews. I don’t support him, but I imagine he was cornered into the response he gave. Here’s how it would have happened:

Reporter: Minister Nottage, were you shocked at all by the discovery of two young teenagers being shot to death in bushes?

Nottage: I can’t honestly say that I was shocked, because unfortunately I see this all the time. So often in fact that it is becoming a trend.

Reporter then writes in her/his story: ‘Minister of National Security Bernard Nottage says he was not shocked to learn of the death of two young boys shot behind bushes on a track road.” Boom. Headline. Controversy. Paper sells.

I think we are all at a point now in the lawless Bahamian society where certain things are no longer shocking, even though we are horrified by them. And that’s the audio clip missing from Nottage’s interview ... the one wherein he would have expressed that he was horrified by this crime inflicted upon our youth and that he found it to be despicable as well as saddening (which he did say). Maybe he said all of that and the reporter didn’t include it, but if he didn’t go beyond revealing how unsurprised he was as well as saddened then we can say that is bordering on mindless insensitivity.

Going bananas over BAMSI

REGARDING Bravest Davis and the BAMSI banana advertisment with the PLP logo, Davis insists that there was nothing wrong with a PLP government putting a PLP logo on an ad for a non-partisan entity supposedly born out of a PLP initiative.

Davis says why shouldn’t the PLP take pride in one of their successful accomplishments? Well, first of all, to call BAMSI successful is a wee bit premature at this stage. What factors are we using to measure its successfulness? Further, Davis doesn’t get that it was simply in poor taste to assign party affiliation to something meant to be free of partisan divisiveness. He doesn’t get that the low level of education among Bahamians - also a PLP accomplishment - will lead those Bahamians to look at the picture, see BAMSI, see PLP, and conclude that the PLP must be good because they brought us all those lovely bananas from BAMSI. Or does he get it?

As for the uncertainty that is BAMSI, one day there’s a ban on beef from Brazil and suddenly the next day BAMSI will be focusing on beef production? How stupid do you have to be to not see this as a political entity drenched in PLP partisanship?

Visa difficulties

THE US State Department recently issued a list of new visa requirements to its embassies around the globe, courtesy of the Trump administration’s war on terrorism.

If it makes it to full enforcement, the new requirements will call for an extreme degree of detail from visa applicants: 15 years of work history, all phone numbers, email addresses and social media account usernames used in the past five years. It’s only a matter of time until getting a US visa will be so difficult it won’t be worth it to try and get one. And I’m guessing that’s what the Trump administration is counting on.

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