The Tribune

By Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett

In the week after the resounding change in national direction engendered by the general election it is important to take stock of where we are and where we want to see ourselves go, and to see how best we can get there.

Can we plan better for future development? This is especially significant when we consider the paradigm that has developed in the United States in the attempt to repeal so-called Obamacare.

In many ways, the situation that has developed under Trump is indicative of seriously disabling inequalities. These inequalities have played themselves out in very interesting ways, especially as regards gender and class. Perhaps as a nation we need to focus on the developing situation there that threatens to undermine so much of the progress made over the last two generations towards women’s empowerment, for example.

We have an opportunity now to create positive change for the country and its citizens that can remove some of the mechanisms that keep people in positions of poverty and disabling inequality.

When the gender equality referendum failed to receive the support of Bahamian voters in 2016, a clear and loud message rang out across the length and breadth of the Bahamian archipelago: we do not think that women have a problem in accessing rights.

There were serious efforts to send up red herrings in the community that would intentionally bias the public and so ensure the failure of the referendum. The biggest red herring that caught everyone by the ‘short and curlies’ was of course the fact that the government was trying to make same sex marriage legal, and because no one trusted the government, notwithstanding whatever they did or said that might placate the public, the public was sure they were being duped.

We had been duped badly already by the opinion poll on gambling that many numbers folk saw as threatening their winnings in the numbers houses.

Today, there seem to be more numbers houses than churches or barrooms, and some of them seem to have ‘legally’ taken on the role of banks, which undermines trust and economic stability, and erodes equality even further in an already deeply unequal society.

However, because of social programming that says we must defend a particular agenda, we bought into the idea that same-sex marriage was beating down the door to our country. Meanwhile, we turned back a move towards less inequality through majority rule and the women’s suffrage movement.

Some people even offered that it did not matter that women were in fact second-class citizens. To be sure, again, by virtue of being Bahamian we are all second-class citizens, especially when it comes to economic opportunity, unless we own millions and benefit from access to cheap capital and financing. The Bahamian economy unequally and blindly empowers non-Bahamians through a legal framework that chooses to shower foreign direct investment with benefits. Again, men benefit more than women, even in this sector.

Thinking about medical care, learning from the US

In the wake of Trumpcare’s success, we must consider how women and the working classes are disenfranchised by a system that uses a serious legally enshrined bias to remove their access to many types of medical service or even their access to affordable medical insurance because few of them understand the policy speak documents are coded in.

According to a part of the new deal, if a woman is raped she can be denied access to affordable medical assistance because rape can be construed as a pre-existing condition. Apparently there is also a challenge to women’s access to family planning as this could also be seen as a pre-existing condition. This is a lesson that the US and those afflicted there will need to examine on their own. The questions that arise from such a mammoth failure of democratic process that truly seeks to empower all people equally is, can a similar ill be visited on our small country?

As we prepare to dive into the deep end of National Health Insurance (NHI) that will undo a number of systems that are already in place, are we asking how this step into the unknown will directly and indirectly impact the majority of those we consider to be less equal in our society?

Have we stopped to take serious stock of who benefits from NHI and how it will impact single women, single mothers and the elderly, many of whom happen to be women? Given that women form the majority of heads of households/families in the country, how will this group be empowered or disempowered by NHI? Will it be as gender biased as VAT is?

We have underscored and reinforced how clearly VAT disempowers single mothers in the nation. By making women pay more for everything from cheap, poor-quality, low-nutritional-value food that is sold at a premium prices, as well as paying VAT on medical care, health insurance, school fees, clothing, clinic visits, we are severely compromising their ability to survive.

Given that women earn less than men and are more often than not the sole provider in the home, we understand that the intention, even if ‘unintentional’ of the government was to severely hinder their upward progress.

The other group who is almost equally as damned by the system are the elderly, who are usually living off a pension or national insurance benefits that cannot sustain an ant, but on which they must survive because they are given no other options.

Given this reality, can we now step back and reexamine the seriously damaging economic policies that arguably improve the fiscal health of the state, but do so by destroying the nation than by empowering it? Many of these policies are so ‘intentionally’ gender biased and obviously target massively unequal groups, it is hard to think that this ‘targeting’ was not seen in the original plan.

However, in a country that used the credit and truck system to continue to disempower the freed blacks after emancipation, we cannot assume that the intention was not to continue to perpetuate the status quo and to render women less equal than men. At every turn the VAT system was gender biased and worked to blindly impoverish women, especially working-class women.

As the new Free National Movement government takes office, can we position ourselves to be able to take advantage of the potential to create positive change?

Let’s learn from the ‘mistake’ made by our neighbours to the north that (un)wittingly disempowers women and the working classes, and choose to change policies that potentially create similar evils here or that work to silence and impoverish large groups of us that are already struggling second-class citizens.

• Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett