The Tribune

EDITOR, The Tribune.

The experience that best prepared Dr Hubert Minnis for the job of Prime Minister just might be his stint as a businessman.

His medical training may have informed his compassion and empathy for others but it’s probably his time making payroll, tackling state bureaucracy and remaining competitive that is producing the impetus to transform the government.

The Prime Minister is taking on a monolith bureaucracy with a reputation for pampering its own civil servants and for coddling the mandarins who control them.

Civil servants love precedence. Most of what they do has been done before and if there is nothing in their files detailing how something was done, then a pioneering request or proposal could be ignored, denied or bludgeoned to death by endless red tape and run-around.

Minnis seems intent on turning red tape into a red carpet. He wants to use technology to make it easier, faster, cheaper and more efficient for citizens to interface with their government.

The PM must continue reinventing government. He wants to visit Singapore to see how they run what arguably is the most efficient civil service in the Commonwealth, if not in the world.

He should take a couple of senior civil servants with him and leave them there for a year. The PM will discover that the Singapore economic miracle started when the government went outside of the civil service to recruit Permanent Secretaries and Senior Directors who led the revolution that transformed the city state.

Top level talent was recruited and paid handsomely to come into the government and make it more efficient. Then leave. They re-directed the human talent that sat in reserve in many ministries.

“Minnis the reformer” has begun to carve away at some of the biggest governmental impediments to growth in our economy.

Critically, what Minnis is doing will boost the confidence of local investors and provide the kinds of reform that international lending agencies and foreign investors have longed to see.

Realizing the economic nightmare he inherited from Perry Christie, Minnis is doing the opposite of Perryism. Instead of spending money we don’t have, he is pumping the fiscal brakes, slowing the growth in the budget deficit and pulling us back from another downgrade which would have increased our costs of borrowing, leading perhaps to penury.

Our economy is largely dependent on government spending and any sharp pulling on the reins would be disastrous. A gradual approach to reining in spending is sound policy. Now we must shift focus from consumption to investments.

Minnis has committed his government to renewable energy. If he can reduce the cost of energy then we reduce our oil import bill, reduce costs for business and homes, make Bahamas Power and Light more efficient and energy more reliable.

Just think of the millions we won’t have to spend on home and business generators.

Not to mention what this will do for the environment. Despite the initial cost, investment in solar and wind will pay for itself.

Some of the PM’s initiatives are designed for small businesses. He removed the block on Bahamians holding foreign currency bank accounts that go all the way back to the second world war when the Bahamas was a part of the sterling bloc and Britain wanted to make sure the colonies were not swapping pounds for US dollars.

This policy lasted so long partly because the rich kept their US dollars in accounts outside the Bahamas, flaunting the regulations but secure in the knowledge that no-one would do anything about it.

As of February, some the millions that sit in bank accounts in Florida may find their way into US dollar denominated accounts here. Beware, however, some local banks are dinosaurs from the same stone age as civil servants.

The biggest problem local businessmen have is poor access to credit. The PM will need to coax the banks to take calculated risks, careful not to turn away the next Bahamas Striping success story.

Special attention must be paid to those businesses that export, those that can help with import substitution, and those that are micro targeted at the tourism industry.

Atlantis and Baha Mar and others are active purchasers of goods and services. More of that needs to be contracted for locally instead of always resorting to buy in Miami those goods that even Miami has to import.

As the PM’s reforms bring civility to the public service he can start to cajole institutions that are sitting on pots of money to engage with the private sector. Instead of only buying Treasury bills and government bonds, non-traditional financial institutions such as trade unions, insurance companies and even the National Insurance Fund could pool a small percentage of their resources into a venture capital fund to support new businesses.

They ought to invest for the long term, cashing out when these companies go public on our stock market or list on others.

Now that the PM has started to build his transformational bridge reshaping the country from a collection of sleepy settlements into what he brilliantly called “an archipelago of opportunities”, the private sector needs to start building its end of the bridge to meet him halfway.

THE GRADUATE

Nassau,

January 24, 2018.