The Tribune

ANNIVERSARIES, national or personal, become times of reflection. In personal relationships, that reflection can evoke feelings of joy or sadness. There are memories that jump right out at you – the first kiss, the birth of a child, a graduation ceremony, a fight when words that should never have been spoken rang out and would not stop ringing in your ear.

But national anniversaries are different. They may evoke pride, but not joy or sadness, mostly a feeling of sameness.

Past the first one with a ceremony in which one flag is lowered and another raised, a ceremony where thousands rise and shout in exuberance and celebration, exploding with a new sense of self-importance, it is hard to find those special moments in a country’s life that make one anniversary feel different from another.

Family dynamics change, but national objectives linger. That’s because it just takes sooooo long to get things done, yet we have this innate, unbridled need to celebrate every year, as if we were celebrating having gotten through it instead of what we got done going through it.

If you need evidence, check dozens of passages in the 1,000-page Volume I of former Prime Minister Hubert A. Ingraham’s book, I Say What I Mean and I Mean What I Say. (The book, by the way, aside from weighing so much that carrying it could substitute for a gym workout, is extraordinary and should be required reading in every government school as well as every private school that really wants to educate its students).

But back to the point about getting things done. Chapter title after chapter title, subhead after subhead, could be repeated today and we would think the news is current.

Titles like these: Increased Attention to Youth Development (Page 247), Bahamasair Intransigent Problems of Accountability (Page 391). Modernizing the Judicial Process (Page 410). Job Creation in the Bahamian Economy, an address in 1995. It is not just that the titles are general issues that could recur in any decade. The actual content would still be relevant. That’s the crux of why celebrating national anniversaries without commiserate actions isn’t quite the same as family dynamics where you can point to a pivotal event and say, “Hey, look what happened this year.”

If you still don’t believe that the more things change, the more they stay the same, take these parts from the book by Mr Ingraham who first assumed office in August 1992. There’s the address to the nation on Local Government. Three years later, he was introducing a limited form of local government to the Family Islands, though not with taxing or spending authority, and a conciliatory nod to New Providence with the election of school boards as a first step. That means the promise of local government for New Providence, a contemporary subject now, was a contemporary subject then. And where are we with local government for the island now? Still opening downtown daily without a manager or mayor or authority in charge. If I am not mistaken, limited local government was intended to take effect in the 1995-1996 budget or approximately 9490 days ago, give or take a few hours.

There is another contribution in the book detailing the work that must be done to correct the issues on Village Road. Thirty years later, that work is finally being done.

No one is blaming Mr Ingraham. Nor are we blaming anyone who followed. In government, as in most bureaucratic operations that operate with a shortage of resources and an abundance of demand, things, well, just take their sweet time.

Yet anniversaries come every year.

As Sir Arthur Foulkes writes in the Foreword to what I can only praise as a vessel of crisp observation and a salute to struggle, “I commend these writings to current and future generations who will find them a treasury of ideas and policies, most of which will stand the test of time.”

Maybe the purpose of national anniversaries is to remind us what is still on the drawing board and send us back to it with renewed energy.

On the other hand, there’s always next year.

As I said, the more things change . . .

Poaching in Bahamian waters

When an American couple was stopped for allegedly poaching and accused of, though not charged with, taking crawfish during the closed season in the Exuma Land and Sea Park where fishing of any kind is forbidden, two interesting things happened.

One, Bahamians were up in arms that such an affront could have happened, and cheering the fact that our marine resources were being protected.

Two, the couple was advised to go back to their vessel for the night as there was no place to hold them in Warderick Wells where the headquarters of the 176-square mile park managed by the Bahamas National Trust is located in the middle of the Exuma cays. The next day they apparently turned up in Grand Bahama and from there the story got even stranger.

Were they going to be allowed to go home with a slap on their wrist? Was being shamed punishment enough?

Did law enforcement take the case too lightly or was the embarrassment too severe for private sustenance fishing in a protected area, a place where you are not even permitted to swim away with a broken piece of sea fan?

All I see, and forgive me if this seems cynical, is a whole lot of hypocrisy.

Why didn’t the same people who cheered at the temporary capture of these crawfish “criminals” have the same strong reaction when this newspaper published a photo of a boat laden with hundreds if not thousands of conch?

Is it because the harvesting of conch, no matter how aggressively, is legal and the taking of four crawfish is not?

Was it really about the legality or is the truth that one act that violates our good stewardship of marine resources was committed by foreigners and the other, which was far more abusive, was done by Bahamians?

Ask yourself. I know how I feel.

Both turn my stomach. Without the precious resources of the sea, our lives will change for the worse.

Future generations will hear stories of conch and see pictures of the mollusk as they digest some veg-pretend-meat-soy-whatever mumbo jumbo that will never begin to compare with a fresh conch salad or scorch.

So long as hypocrisy wins, all of us lose. Not all that is lawful is right, it may be on the right side of the law, but not on the right side of the laws of nature.