The Tribune

376 years ago in the year 1648, a group of brave and courageous individuals landed on an island in the Bahamas now known as Eleuthera. The adventurers named it after the Greek word “Eleutheria” for freedom. In recent months, present day settlers of Eleuthera have felt more like prisoners than persons enjoying freedom.

Prisoners of an infrastructure that does not work, that broke down over decades, and in the last months, has exposed flaws that raise health and security alarms. For nearly ten days, many Eleutherans had no water. The power goes off for hours on end, internet is intermittent, appliances are being blown up due to surges and power failures, and in the most personal way, these failures affect human life.

A mother turns on the tap to bathe her baby, there is no water. She takes a cloth and washes him with the little bit of drinking water she has left. He goes to bed, and with dirty fingernails, rubs his eyes. The next day he wakes up crying with an infection. And still, there is no water.

A restaurant worker who needs water to wash dishes or rinse lettuce uses trickles from a bottle of drinking water. Neither the dishes, nor the food he was trying to wash are perfectly clean.

A wedding party prepares to dress for the big event, they turn on the tap, to no avail.

Fortunately, many Eleutherans like their brave and courageous predecessors have learned over the years to bypass the government’s promise of reliable utilities. Many have cisterns or rely on wells, but well pumps require electricity. Some have installed solar, but most depend on the BPL grid. One resident said that in the seven years that he has lived on mainland Eleuthera, he has never seen it this bad or experienced this level of extreme frustration. “Nothing works everyday” he says. “It’s either the electricity goes out, there no water, or the internet is down. Sometimes it is all three at once. How are we supposed to live?”

As observers, we can look at each case individually. The water situation, for instance, is complex. Aqua Design, the private provider through its RO plant, has been slammed for inadequate production, yet insiders say that the company produces more than its contracted amount, and the fault lies with Water and Sewage Corp, which is responsible for distribution and is riddled with leaks in its distribution channel. Whatever the case, it has been a rocky relationship between the government and the private provider for years. It is time to move past the finger pointing.

Major upgrades have been promised time and again, yet when that young mother turns on the tap, and there is still no water, and the baby wakes up with an infected eye, government promises cannot heal the infection, or stop the crying.

Eleuthera’s woes are a result of a nation’s failure to address its basic national infrastructural needs. Administration after administration has used Band-Aids to solve one infrastructural crisis at a time.

A thousand Band-Aids do not make a patient better, they just lead to a patient covered in Band-Aids.

Management by crisis is inefficient, expensive, and in the long run, ineffective.

May Eleuthera be the clarion call for a national development plan and let us hope that the strength and courage that the original settlers brought to Eleuthera keep Eleutherans strong, and their despair lead, finally, to the development of a national plan.