The Tribune

YOU may remember the political row surrounding the health travel visa and the selection of payment processing company Kanoo to handle payments for the visa.

For a time, it made a lot of headlines, with the company subject to criticism on social media and suggestions of wrongdoing, despite the company owners’ protestations of having handled things above board.

Even Wayne Munroe, then candidate for Freetown and now Minister of National Security, got in on the discussion, asking: “Can they tell us who awarded them the contract? Can they produce the contract, and can they produce audited numbers?”

He said: “These are young professionals, so they should be bright enough to know that they should expect to provide answers.”

It’s always interesting to see politicians who demand answers in opposition to compare their zeal for the same when in office, but Mr Munroe and the government now has answers on the health travel visa – and it’s overall good news.

The Auditor General, Terrance Bastian, delivered a report on the implementation of the programme which was tabled in the House of Assembly yesterday and, while there were some discrepancies in accounting records, the auditor had rare words of praise for the scheme.

There were no signs of fraud or grave mismanagement, and Mr Bastian said: “We want to commend the Ministry of Tourism for its vision and implementation of the Bahamas Health Travel Visa. It assisted The Bahamas in monitoring the movement of people travelling during the pandemic. During such extraordinary times, government needs to be creative, flexible without jeopardising good governance (transparency and accountability).”

We would hope those who criticised Kanoo would now be as quick to praise them and the government for the scheme now that the report has arrived. And yet, it all seems to be a bit quiet.

Is this to be the way of things? To be loud in criticism, but silent when the criticism proves unfounded?

Or was this all a political gimmick on the campaign trail at the expense of those same young professionals Mr Munroe referred to?

At the time, Kanoo’s chairman said this kind of sniping highlighted why talented Bahamians chose to remain abroad and not come home, and that the company was another victim of black crab syndrome where “too often in this country we tear down people who are making inroads”.

It is hard indeed to say he is wrong.

Pledge conference

Former Prime Minister Dr Hubert Minnis would have us believe that the pledge conference to raise funds in the wake of Hurricane Dorian was nothing to do with the government.

Oh no, he says, it was a United Nations event. Not my administration, honest.

That would be the same Dr Minnis pictured on our front page today at the conference.

It would also be the same Dr Minnis whose administration was named in a press release saying the event was organised by the government of The Bahamas in partnership with the UN Development Programme.

It is also the same Dr Minnis who led the administration including members who discussed the outcome of the pledge conference, notably Minister of State for Disaster Preparedness Iram Lewis.

Strangely, Dr Minnis wasn’t distancing himself from the conference immediately after the event, saying that critics of it were making “silly, confused and uninformed statements”.

He added at the time: “The Bahamas has never experienced a storm like Dorian. As a result, we have not had a high-level pledging conference of this nature.”

That word “we” there seems notable.

It would perhaps be disingenuous of Dr Minnis to pretend this was nothing to do with him, just as it is disingenuous of Disaster Reconstruction Authority chairman Alex Storr to criticise the amount pledged at the conference as it was always clear that the government would need to sort through the pledges afterwards to see what was useful, and what was not – and the overall amount was distorted by one particularly huge pledge that made up the lion’s share of commitments.

The conference might not have raised a huge sum of money, but it was certainly worth trying. Anything that came out of it would be more than we had before it, and given the state of Abaco and Grand Bahama after the storm, every cent was needed.

So stop with the games on both sides, and stop treating people like fools.