The Tribune

By SIMON

A friend recalls visiting Managua, the capital of Nicaragua, for the tenth anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution, which overthrew the much-hated Anastasio Somoza Debayle, whose family ruled the country from 1936 to 1979.

Navigating the city proved immensely difficult because there were few to no street signs, partly a legacy of the 1972 earthquake that devastated the downtown and surrounding areas, which now has a population of approximately over one million.

After visiting the city, the musician Bono, of U2, wrote a song entitled, “Where the streets have no name”. The haphazard city plan is another legacy of the earthquake.

The Somoza Dynasty kept a stranglehold on the nation. The liberation from the dictatorship was brief. Daniel Ortega, who led the revolution against the Dynasty, became a brutal dictator like many others throughout history who once stylised themselves as democrats.

Development requires a certain mindset. While it also requires competence and good managers, development begins with a vision and an ambition about what a country can and should be. Nicaragua, like other countries, is locked in a cycle of underdevelopment and political paralysis.

Leaders who embody the mindset, the vision, and the ambition to modernise or transform a society are pivotal. Competent leaders who lack these qualities may realise some goals. But they are not transformative.

The French demographer, anthropologist and historian Alfred Sauvy, enjoys credit for the term Third World, which was coined during the Cold War. The term applied to countries, many of them former colonies, that were not ideologically of the Soviet socialist bloc or the Western capitalist bloc.

It was originally thought of as a political rather than an economic designation. As most of these countries were not industrialised and economically poorer they were pejoratively deemed to be part of a lower tier of undeveloped nations.

Today, “Third World” has been replaced with appellations such as Global South, developing countries or least developed countries.

The Bahamas works and feels like an admixture of a developing and least developing country. In terms of services, public and private, and infrastructure there are some things that work well. And, there is much that is maddeningly frustrating and highly dysfunctional.

Though New Providence has a modern international airport, many of the airports in the Family Islands are terribly undeveloped.

We drive many modern cars and SUVs on major thoroughfares that are well-paved with adequate signage but typically have to turn onto pot-holed roads or two-lane roads that long ago needed to become four-lane highways.

The reliability of basic utilities throughout the country, including electricity, water, and telecommunications has diminished dramatically.

We have among the finest tourism properties in the region alongside urban ghettos with entrenched poverty and all manner of social dysfunction. Even our main downtown is rundown, filthy, and unappealing.

Still, The Bahamas enjoys extraordinary advantages including our proximity to the United States and an archipelago teeming with opportunities. Over the decades, we have made social, economic and infrastructural progress in myriad areas.

Nevertheless, 50 years after independence, something vital is missing. Much has atrophied. We are regressing. Various standards have been breeched and are now overrun with tidal waves of slackness, decrepitude, and rank and corrosive cronyism.

Our mentality and ambition for development have stymied dramatically. We lack leaders with a greater desire for change or a deeper sense of what we could be as a nation. Many of the basic features of a more developed country are lacking.

During previous decades, leaders often spoke of The Bahamas moving to First World status economically. Today, this is more pretension than aspiration! We talk a good game in fancy speeches with clichéd and frilly language.

But few of our leaders and many of our people lack the depth of desire and the ambition to move beyond our developmental lethargy and morass. The necessity of street signage is in instructive.

There are basic amenities in a developed country such as street signs and the numbering of homes and businesses.

During the 1970s and 80s, while a number of the main streets in New Providence had signage, there was no systematic program of numbering buildings and signs for many side roads on the island. Family Islands likewise were devoid of proper road traffic signage of all sorts.

One cannot develop a country devoid of basic services and order. While there has been considerable development on our most populous island, it has been uneven. Moreover, we have failed miserably, dramatically, and consistently to maintain basic infrastructure.

For a relatively brief, though pivotal period, Hubert Ingraham showed the country a better way. He began with the basics. He launched an ambitious programme to ensure that structures were numbered and there was proper road signage.

Ingraham was impressed with the ambitious and multidecade road planning and building programme in British Columbia in Canada that continued beyond various government administrations.

When travelling the Caribbean and other regions, he played close attention to the proper functioning and maintenance of roadworks, verges, and public parks and areas.

Many weekends, he famously toured New Providence. Back in office on Monday morning, he issued instructions to public officers to repair government buildings, to clean cemeteries and parks, to remove debris, to fix what was broken.

Yes, he was a highly competent manager, acting as a combination of prime minister and mayor. However as or more importantly, he had a vision, an ambition, a mindset of a more developed and advanced country. Policy linked to values and political ingenuity and will were essential, qualities he embodied. He fixed much that was broken. He also instituted and built man new things.

As has been told repeatedly, Ingraham significantly developed Abaco. This is in stark contrast as to how underdeveloped three PLP prime ministers left their constituencies, either purposefully or because of indifference.

Some leaders left their constituencies to deteriorate, doing little to improve the conditions of the area. They gave handouts, and talked about compassion for the poor, while leaving the residents of their constituencies in dire shape.

In three terms in office, Ingraham burnished his its progressive vision and agenda in areas such as health care, women’s rights, poverty alleviation, social services and infrastructural development. He provided long-suffering Family Island communities with basic amenities.

The lessons of Hubert Ingraham are clear. Sadly, today, there is clearly less ambition in the political directorate to undertake an era of transformation, much less a period of reform and modernisation.

Many in the elite are indifferent to the needs of the poor and the working and middle class, suffering from the poor quality of basic services.

During the major roadworks on New Providence undertaken by Ingraham, there is the story told of an executive whose route to work involved travel from the Western end of the island to Paradise Island.

Told of the disruption in many areas Over-the-Hill and on other parts of the island he remarked, “I don’t care about them areas as long as my route is clear.” This captures some of the indifference on our crime-plagued capital island that in significant ways is now a Tale of Two Islands.

There is an attitude of indifference among many of the elite who receive their health care overseas, who live in gated enclaves, who lack ambition beyond their personal interests or needs, who no longer are truly moved by the needs of the poor beyond handouts and solely transactional politics and clientilism.

While many happily enjoy the amenities of developed countries, they do not have the mindset or the abiding desire to ensure Bahamians increasingly enjoy similar services or amenities. They lack greater ambition for the people beyond platitudes.

How is it in the 21st century that the Road Traffic Department is incapable of printing licence plates in a timely manner? The mindset and indifference behind this failure is extraordinary.

Now, apply this mindset to the tremendous need for broader initiatives to stem youth violence and crime. Many are blind to the greater possibilities for development and the creation of 360-degree approach to our social challenges.

A more developed Bahamas that also addresses our complex of social challenges will require akin to life-saving surgery and ongoing therapy. Bandages and tourniquets are insufficient.

But we must openly and thoroughly diagnose the challenges and have a greater ambition beyond the proverbial Third World mindset that is pervasive and paralysing, especially among our political class.