The Tribune

By Fred Smith QC

The PM’s edict that work permits are to be reduced simply because too many have been issued is nonsense and pure economic suicide.

The government cannot on the one hand encourage Bahamian and foreign direct investment - which by necessity requires many foreign work permits, while at the same time issuing racist, xenophobic, insecure, myopic and counterproductive pronouncements like this!

I don’t understand why the PM still thinks he’s in election mode.

It is unnecessary for him to make these grand standing public pronouncements as if he’s trying to get elected.

If I was already a foreign or domestic investor, I would make plans to close shop pretty quickly, pack my bags and go and find a more investor-friendly, politically stable, sensible, rational business environment elsewhere (but of course Bahamians can’t really do that because we still suffer under the yoke of exchange control).

Doing business in The Bahamas has become almost impossible with all of the arbitrary policies that change from day to day and between administrations. The over-control and suffocating red tape keeps growing despite the government saying it’s going to do something about it.

Dr Minnis’s latest diktat is uninformed, arbitrary, gratuitous and unnecessary.

There is no analysis as to why he has said this, it doesn’t reflect any consideration of whether or not there are or are not large projects that require work permits, to what extent permits have been issued under the Commercial Enterprises Act, and to what extent foreign or Bahamian investors have required workers and or other skilled labour to come in.

The PM has escaped the reservation AGAIN and has completely lost the foreign and domestic investment plot!

In addition, it is quite illegal and unconstitutional to have such a policy because every application for a work permit must be considered on its own particular merits with respect to the circumstances surrounding that particular application. It cannot be arbitrary.

Government cannot have a general policy of simply not issuing any further work permits or simply reducing the number of work permits to be issued because it has reached some number that seems subjectively, to offend the PM and which he has pinned to the front page of newspapers as a demagogic badge of honour for voter effect three and a half years before the next election! Yes! The sand is running out!

It is time for The Bahamas to be run by politicians and high level bureaucrats who have experience in business.

If he wants to do something sensible and make a fundamental change to entrench democracy in the Bahamas for the future, as a one-term PM, I urge him to reform the political process so that the rule of law can take root and the Bahamas can grow economically, by using his supermajority to change the constitutional structure so that Cabinet can be chosen from a broader cross-section of smart and capable members of society as opposed to only from the limited number of Members of Parliament.

Indeed, the constitutional construct whereby Cabinet is composed only of members chosen from both houses of parliament, runs counter to a democracy in which there are checks and balances between the executive and the legislative branches of government.

Despite our current constitutional Westminster model, because we are such a small country with a limited number of Members of Parliament, the executive branch of government, through the Office of the Prime Minister, holds the majority of the Members of Parliament in the governing party hostage.

They can never utter a sensible criticism or operate as a check and balance against excess and or plain stupidity by the executive because the majority are beholden to the good graces of a dictatorial Prime Minister for their pay and perks in Cabinet or salaries as chairpersons of government boards all of whom are changeable at will by the Prime Minister.

The Westminster system works in the United Kingdom (or other large British Commonwealth nations) because in the UK they have over 650 members of parliament that can hold a small Cabinet accountable. Even the Speaker of the House, Mr Moultrie, appreciates this and recently called for a reduced number of cabinet members.

The PM is inflicting economic recession on The Bahamas by scaring away current and potential domestic foreign investment.

No wonder Freeport is on life support with this kind of attitude.

Investors require a stable and predictable business and political environment; not successive governments and indeed current government’s blowing hot and cold on investment policies and laws.

The PM keeps forgetting that the only thing that will help to grow the economy through domestic and or foreign direct investment is a prolonged manifestation by The Bahamas of respect for the rule of law.

Arbitrary and wildly fluctuating political pronouncements terrify legitimate long-term business planning investors.

The PM also fails to recognise the countries that have been growing the fastest have all been countries which encourage foreign immigration so as to expand the economy with the human and capital resources they bring and by increasing critical population mass so that an economy grows.

The Bahamas is underpopulated and Freeport, Grand Bahama, is an example where we actually need 100,000 to 200,000 foreign residents to bring prosperity to the island because we Bahamians do not have the financial economic capacity to do so. If the PLP had not been so rabidly racist, insecure and xenophobic, and if successive PLP and FNM administrations (except for a brief moment of partial sanity by the first Ingraham administration between 1992 to 1997) had not continued to over-control Freeport and break the Hawksbill Creek Agreement, the Magic City would be a humming economic engine in The Bahamas where hundreds of thousands of Bahamians and foreigners would working.

That is what Freeport was originally created for.

In addition the government’s policy of continuing to approve investments everywhere other than Freeport, is also counterproductive.

The government’s policy should be to prefer or direct investors such as the $100m Paul Wynn development on Cable Beach to Freeport, Grand Bahama. There is no reason why that development could not be insisted upon in Freeport, where the land is less expensive, the infrastructure is better and there is a desperate need for jobs and economic growth.

Yet in Nassau, it has been approved on a tiny little strip of land, where there is horrible road congestion, the infrastructure cannot provide for continuing expansion, and the economy is already growing steadily.

Yet the government continues to allow foreigners who wish to invest to dictate where they wish to do so instead of having a national development plan which The Planning and Subdivision Act requires.

As Judge Bain pronounced in her recent judgment regarding the PSA in one of the Nygard Judicial Reviews, the PSA requires a National Land Use Plan to be developed for New Providence and each of the Family Islands.

Instead of making grandstanding and grandiose public pronouncements that erode confidence in the rule of law and detract from stability and thereby help to destroy opportunities for Bahamians, I urge the PM to be more circumspect and careful in his public pronouncements as domestic and foreign investors gauge the temperature for investing by what the leader of the country says.

I urge him instead to say less, adopt a policy for the immigration department to liberalise immigration, cut out all the red tape for domestic and foreign investment, and follow through on the requirements of various pieces of well drafted legislation that will actually help to grow the economy in a sensible and rational fashion.

In addition, the Government can’t be driving The Bahamas to sign on to the WTO and become part of the Global Economy while at the same time arbitrarily closing our doors to Immigration.

It is simply contradictory and makes absolutely no sense.

Say less and do more please, Prime Minister Minnis.