The Tribune

EDITOR, The Tribune.

Because of his decades of service to this country Darrell Erwin Rolle was deserving in death of the full glorious tribute and sendoff we typically give.

And in any other year but 2020 he would have gotten it.

A quiet and unassuming man from Lowe Sound, Andros, Rolle was the loyal soldier who saluted and then diligently carried out the duties assigned to him. If he didn’t want to do so, nobody ever knew. He played his cards close to his vest.

He hailed from an enterprising family who valued hard work and self-reliance.

Rolle’s death at the peak of a coronavirus lockdown was a shock. He had soldiered on after losing his late wife Beryl, and never once complained about anything.

He was a lifelong PLP and stalwart councilor, a high priest in the party. He believed that all political parties and politicians have their season and no doubt, even in retirement, he would have been in Brave Davis’s war room at the next election.

When he campaigned in Andros during his days on the trail, Rolle would rather cancel a rally when inclement weather threatened than risk anyone to “catch a check” in the pouring rain.

Yet somehow, we are to believe that Rolle would be happy over the potential to put hundreds of mourners in the cross-hairs of the coronavirus by having a big church funeral just to satisfy the taphophiles in his party.

It is hard to imagine that his children, his family and those who knew him in a personal and non-official capacity would want to have on their conscience that even one person got coronavirus as a direct result of paying respect to their fallen father, grandfather, brother and friend.

It was especially disconcerting to hear PLP Chairman Fred Mitchell, a man who knew Rolle better and longer than most, using the occasion of his capacity-limited funeral toå lob cheap political shots.

It boggled the mind to hear him castigate the Prime Minister for refusing to allow an exemption to the social gathering protocols to enable a packed church and crowded graveside of mourners for Rolle.

This is the same Mitchell whose party leader successfully recovered from Covid. There are other Bahamians still recovering from Covid.

No matter what Covid policy the government promulgates, Mitchell is against it before the Prime Minister announces it.

Mitchell had an unlikely ally in his metaphorical foxhole. He associated himself with the strangest of bedfellows, his arch nemesis Hubert Ingraham who, for reasons known only to himself, castigated Rolle’s Covid-driven funeral restrictions.

Always one to telegraph his politics in Bletchley Park level Morse code, Ingraham didn’t have to poke the wasp nest at this time. But “stick-and-move” is a dance he knows well, and Mitchell just couldn’t resist cavorting in Ingraham’s scrap gang.

A PLP-turned-FNM-turned-PLP Mitchell has a long love-hate relationship with the former FNM Prime Minister who rescued him from political purgatory in 1992 putting him in frontline politics for the first time as a senator.

The current Prime Minister was widely criticised for relaxing protocol to allow mourners to attend the funeral of Dr. Philip “Slimey” Thompson. Although only a small number of mourners were allowed to attend, hundreds turned up at the church then joined a junkanoo rush-out to the graveyard and the burial.

It became a Covid super-spreader event and yet another example to the Prime Minister that we don’t always do what we promise.

The rules to slow Covid are masks AND physical distancing but some Bahamians hear masks OR physical distancing.

While the loss in human life from Covid is incalculable, the financial burden we now assume for the hundreds of unexpected hospitalizations and potential at-home care for those victims of Covid will add tens of millions to the national budget deficit.

All Bahamians were called to sacrifice this year. We all know someone who died this year and had less mourners at their funeral than a yard fowl has teeth. Weddings were postponed. Life events put on hold.

Increased funeral-going by politicians is an early indication that the election silly season is drawing near. Some do it for the visibility from the living more so than to pay respect to the dead.

If Mitchell and others want to honour Darrell Rolle they should emulate his humility and take to heart the advice that the old-timers in Fresh Creek give to city-slickers from Nassau: Be sure to taste your words before you spit them out.

THE GRADUATE

Nassau,

November 8, 2020.