Recently, Prime Minister Hubert Ingraham reminded the Leader of the Opposition that in addition to various national issues that the next election will be contested on the core issue of leadership.
Issues don’t get addressed or problems solved by themselves. Or, by ignoring them as Perry Christie usually does. Confronting our national challenges requires a decisive, competent, hardworking, action-oriented Prime Minister with good judgment and tested leadership. It also demands courage.
Mr. Christie is overflowing with theatrical passion, endless talk and promises rarely fulfilled. But he runs huge deficits when it comes to most of the qualities needed to lead The Bahamas:
1. He is acutely and hopelessly indecisive.
2. He ran the most incompetent and dysfunctional Government since Independence.
3. His work ethic is shall we say, laid back.
4. When the choice is between acting and doing nothing, Mr. Christie usually takes a pass on having to do something.
5. It was Perry Christie’s Government that gave us Bluewater, the Korean boat scandal, and the virtual give-away of 10,000 acres at Mayaguana.
6. It was Perry Christie’s Government which failed to introduce any aspect of National Health Insurance or complete a single major infrastructural project in five years despite a better economy and after borrowing $800 million.
7. Perry Christie’s leadership has been tested and found wanting. It is Hubert Ingraham who concluded the Baha Mar deal with major improvements for Bahamians in terms of significantly more contracts and skills training, as well as reducing by tens of millions concession given by Perry Christie and the PLP.
8. When renegotiating the Baha Mar deal with Mr. Ingraham, its principals and creditors saw the measure of the man and accepted many of his key demands. In negotiating with Mr. Christie they knew that he and the PLP are easily rolled.
In terms of decisiveness, competence, hard work, taking action, good judgment and tested leadership, Perry Christie has been “Simply the Worst” Prime Minister of the Commonwealth of The Bahamas. For many Bahamians, Hubert Ingraham has earned the title, “Simply the Best”.
And, what of courage? Before becoming the President of the United States, John F. Kennedy wrote a book on leadership called Profiles in Courage. A student of political leadership and history, JFK knew that electing a leader was not singularly about the issues of the day.
Serving as the Chief Executive of a country requires confronting challenges and making tough and often unpopular decisions. It also involves sometimes challenging one’s own citizens and party to do the right thing and to seize the future.
Most Bahamians and those PLPs honest with themselves would acknowledge that in a comparison between Hubert Alexander Ingraham and Perry Gladstone Christie, that Mr. Ingraham is the more courageous and stronger leader, and, that Mr. Christie is the weaker leader.
Because Mr. Christie always wants to be popular, he endlessly panders trying to be all things to all people. This is the quality of a contestant for Bahamian Idol. It is not what is needed in a Bahamian Prime Minister. Mr. Christie’s decisions, when he is able to make them, are often determined by the last person to leave the room.
Mr. Christie even found it difficult to ask the scandal-ridden Shane Gibson to leave the cabinet, despite his Minister’s questionable actions and the shame and embarrassment he brought to The Bahamas. Indeed he went on television with Shane Gibson basically holding his hands and apologizing and lamenting his having to leave Cabinet. That’s not the actions of a leader.
Were it not for Prime Minister Ingraham, tough decisions would never have been made to finish much-needed road works and installation of utilities, move the downtown Nassau port to Arawak Cay, finally privatize BTC after many years, renegotiate the Baha Mar deal, push through social legislation improving equality for various categories of persons, and keeping the country together during the worldwide financial crisis.
But in addition to courage, Mr. Ingraham has demonstrated his compassion for vulnerable and poorer Bahamians. Compassion is measured in action not talk and pretending to hold someone’s hand and tell them that you feel their pain without removing the causes of their pain. Over three nonconsecutive terms Prime Minister Ingraham has greatly expanded the social security network and enhanced social development in health care, education and housing.
It is Hubert Ingraham and the FNM who introduced unemployment benefits and have now expanded the prescription drug benefit programme to civil servants and the country’s security forces. That quality of compassion can be measured by:
– the 13,000 Bahamians who receive medicine for their high blood pressure, diabetes, cancer, heart condition and depression;
– the 26,655 persons who received unemployment benefits totalling some $30.3 million since 2009;
– the hundreds who are now receiving the unemployment benefit;
– the 26,912 NIB pensioners who began to receive a pension increase since September last year;
– the NIB pensioners who are now guaranteed an increase, by law, equal to the increase in the cost of living, every two years;
– the 28,229 who are receiving $11.2 million monthly in pension payments and those who are now receiving higher sickness, maternity and unemployment benefit payments and the widows and widowers who will get two pension payments – their own and a portion of their survivors pension.
– the hundreds of Bahamians who received grants of up to $10,000 to study abroad;
– the thousands of students who benefitted from the $100 million education loan scheme;
– the people whose lights were turned on because of the FNM’s social assistance programme; and
– the 2,500 young persons who were given temporary employment at the height of the recession.
