Articles & News

September 3, 2008

Bahamians Deserve Better

http://www.jonesbahamas.com/

On any given work-day, scores of young men and women can be seen either on their way to court or on their way from one court or the other in this city. These people are either on remand or have been sentenced to a custodial term at Her Majesty’s Prison complex, located in Fox Hill.

Yet again, on any given work-day scores upon untold scores of people – some of them seemingly able-bodied men and women – are to be seen at the Princess Margaret Hospital or at one or the other satellite clinics owned and operated by the Government of The Bahamas.

Both sets of activities cited here are mind-numbingly expensive – thus some of the challenges the entire Bahamian family is obliged to face as they try to resolve the plethora of economic, social, cultural and political woes that assail.

The situation cited concerning young people who are routinely being packaged for either remand or imprisonment is in and of itself but a symptom of a congeries of other delinquencies and derelictions of duty, inclusive of a manifest failure in our country’s educational systems.

In the instance of the use to which clinics and hospitals is put, some reference must be given to the fact that there are people – primarily Bahamians – who have taken to simply ‘ripping off’ National Insurance. This can only happen where doctors and other health-care professionals collude in the wrong-doing.

The matter involving crime and the role played in it by this or that young thug is – as we see it – directly related to an overly aggressive style of policing where one organized group of [primarily] young men make it their business to roundup and sometimes antagonize other primarily young men. On occasion, arrests are for matters that are decidedly trivial.

Compounding the matter concerning the use to which courts and prisons are put is the fact that very many people who are arrested for crimes like vagrancy, threats of death, loitering and other ‘anti-social’ manifestations of distress are in truth and in fact sometimes quite ill.

Such people are in need, not of incarceration, but of adequate health-care. Sadly, this care only becomes available when the victim somehow hits rock-bottom.

The public at large is more than acquainted with this or that obviously lunatic person – man or woman – who lives on the street and who is assuredly mired and locked in the throes of distress.

These are but some of the poor souls who have taken leave of their senses.

Information reaching us suggests that, some of these people bereft of family support, begging on the streets or sometimes exchanging sexual services for a handout of pennies.

There are whole communities that are today ensnared in cultures where guns, drugs and HIV-AIDS constitute a witches brew of death on the installment plan.

Compounding these manifestations of problems run amok is the fact that these scenes provide a backdrop to lives lived by thousands of this nation’s youth.

These young people will – in all likelihood – reproduce after their own kind – thus providing impetus to a situation that is already dire.

As bad as these things are, there is today an even more troubling matter that deserves attention. Some of those so-called leaders who are often lauded and feted to high heaven were themselves directly complicit in the degradation of this society.

Tragically, some of their offspring [thanks to the money they now own] now aspire to leadership in this or that sphere of social endeavor in today’s Bahamas.

This situation is to say the least quite paradoxical – especially when the subject is turned to the question of ethics and morality in public life. Here the ethic of the social parasite and criminal prevails.

This country deserves better.

A kind of ‘magical’ spirit now both infects and inflects policy making in our country, thus the sense some Bahamians now have that the current administration is working on auto-pilot.

This is no way to run things in a time of crisis.

We are as convinced as ever that the Bahamian people are in urgent need of leaders who can not only lead, but who can begin – with the help of the Bahamian people themselves – to conceive of projects and initiatives large enough and important enough to inspire them to true greatness.

This can and will only come about once people come to the realization that nation-building is a collective enterprise – one requiring the services of each in the service of all.