Minister of Youth, Sports and Culture, the Hon. Neville W. Wisdom is facing his moment of truth. With the evidence in the audited draft report concerning the Bahamas Junkanoo Parades, the Minister and his colleagues are today obliged to face facts which illuminate the extent to which slackness, incompetence and exuberance worked together to create an embarrassment for Prime Minister the Hon. Perry G. Christie and his colleagues.
The draft report submitted by Deloitte and Touche concerning their audit of The Bahamas Junkanoo Parades makes for very sad reading. It is a story of slackness and exuberance run amok. While everyone who loves The Bahamas appreciates and values the high cultural importance of festival arts like Junkanoo, no right thinking Bahamian could possibly support the Minister of Youth, Sports and Culture for the part he played in the debacle. We do not expect the final report to be appreciably different.
It is also safe to say that Mr. Wisdom was in all likelihood totally well intentioned when he embarked upon the junkanoo escapade which ultimately engulfed him and his colleagues in an expensive disaster.
Had the Minister not been so exuberantly optimistic, he would not have been so mesmerised with fantastic projections pointing to junkanoo being a hugely successful financial venture.
As any number of observers presciently warned, the decision to rent bleachers for a whopping one million dollars was egregiously wrong. As a consequence of this really bad decision, an already straitened national fiscal situation was made even worse.
As bad as this situation must currently be for the embarrassed Minister and his Cabinet colleagues, there are lessons they all can and should learn from this sorry matter. The government should facilitate Junkanoo parades and get out of the business of Junkanoo. Everyone knows that governments are bad in running any business.
Assuming that Prime Minister Christie will take responsibility for the disaster it would be entirely appropriate for him to chide, chastise and reprimand Mr. Wisdom for the harm done to the public treasury and to the Junkanoo parades themselves. Further, we are certain that the Minister has learned a lesson from this fiasco. He erred grievously when he took advice, which must have been self-serving, and naive. Whatever committee gave the advice concerning the bleachers must have been either corrupt or simply stupid.
Without belabouring the obvious, the conclusion that Minister of Youth, Sports and Culture was way off base in the matter concerning The Bahamas Junkanoo Parades is beyond sensible dispute.
Editorial, The Bahama Journal
