The Tribune

RECENTLY Prime Minister Dr Hubert Minnis declared that something had to be done to decrease the “thousands” of work permits annually approved by the Immigration Department.

We hope that the Prime Minister is sufficiently attuned to this country’s needs to understand that The Bahamas can only grow if it has the material with which to build. Businesses require highly trained and responsible persons to move forward. Expert competence at the helm allows a business to employ less qualified Bahamians in the hope that one day they will learn by example and eventually be able to qualify for the various executive positions that a business requires. Unless our schools can provide students with higher than a D grade average and parents can instill in them the proper attitude to work, The Bahamas will have to make a decision – lower its standards and fail, or allow businesses to import qualified and responsible staff and succeed.

Statistics from the Immigration Department confirmed that thousands of work permits are approved annually for foreign workers.

“Many of these applications are approved primarily,” said the department, “because employers claim and provide justification that in many instances Bahamians lack the requisite skills and/or certification to fill various vacancies.”

This is not to suggest that The Bahamas does not have any highly qualified and competent Bahamians for the various professions. They are here, but not in sufficient numbers to fulfill the needs of a growing economy. And so until this country is able to produce the number of qualified Bahamians needed to staff a developing country, the Immigration Department will be kept busy supplying work permits.

Labour Minister Dion Foulkes has said that there will be no work permits where Bahamians are qualified for the job. That is fair enough, but who decides if there is a Bahamian qualified for a particular job – the government or the employer? During the PLP’s administration under Pindling it was the government – the government always knew best. And the best qualification that one could have in those days was to be PLP. In all those years The Tribune never qualified – it was never PLP. Besides it needed better qualifications than that to move ahead and grow.

We recall a very “enlightening” conversation that we had with the late Sir Lynden Pindling in his office when we tried to get a permit for a British editor – the editor had to be British because a working knowledge of defamation was important. Sir Lynden said that only a Bahamian should hold that position. We told him that we had searched, we had advertised and that we had trained many young Bahamian journalists, but we could not find anyone with the skills or experience required for that stage of The Tribune’s development. Sir Lynden was convinced that anyone who had been to university could write and that anyone who could write could sit in an editor’s chair. He mentioned the late John Taylor, at that time a well-known Bahamian playwright who was a great friend of The Tribune. John could write, he said, therefore, as night follows day, John could be an editor. We had many a laugh with John over Pindling’s naiveté. John was the first to admit that he was quite incapable – both by temperament and ability – for the job, despite the fact that he was a brilliant playwright.

When The Tribune published on Tribune 242 the prime minister’s recent statement on work permits, a Bahamian wrote to comment: “To tell a business to hire a certain nationality, as opposed to the best candidate, is suicide for the business. If you want the best candidate, educate, train and instill in them a good work ethic. If you want a failed business, keep telling them who to hire. If you want foreigners out of your country, tell your government. Business people want their business to succeed, and will therefore hire the best people. Once you present that ideal job candidate, clean, prompt, honest, a team worker and willing to please, the employer will be ecstatic and will hire them quickly, before someone else does. To think that just because someone has education or a degree in hotel management, they can do the job is foolish and unrealistic.”

The same can be said for journalism or any other business that needs hard working and qualified professionals – The Bahamas has been unable to produce a sufficient number of them to make expensive work permits unnecessary.

We were recently told that a Freeport businessman – despite all of the unemployed in Freeport - had to stop offering a certain product because he could not find a Bahamian to produce it up to the required standard.

And our acceptance of mediocrity all started back with the advent of the PLP under the leadership of the late Sir Lynden Pindling who promised Bahamians that if his party became the government no longer would they be “hewers of wood and drawers of water”.

Twenty years later he regretted those words. “We are falling backward with so-called sophisticatuon,” he complained in April, 1990, “and not putting first things first.”

“Because we have got slack and we’ve got lazy and we’ve got sophisticated over these last 20 years and that’s our fault,” he said. “I accept responsibility for this.” Sir Lynden said they were now moving fast, but in moving so fast they have “lost a couple of important things along the way. Now we’ve got to learn to do again some jobs that we have discarded, just refused to take. Again because we say they’re Haitian jobs. Now we’ve got to get those things back on track.” He observed that jobs requiring technical skills were particularly affected.

“We have got to bring discipline and skills back into our children and people,” he said. “And with all those things we will make our country great.”

And here we are – 28 years later — still without enough skilled Bahamians to either reduce or eliminate work permits.

We suggest this government concentrate on building more qualified and dedicated Bahamians before it interferes with work permits that are assisting this country in its forward motion.