Since Stafford Sands established the hotel industry as it is known today, development has been skewered in favour of a creature known as the “investor”. Mention of Bahamians has been reduced to the single word “jobs”.
The jobs juggernaut has been rolling along quite nicely with various and successive Ministers usually of Tourism, telling Bahamians that this or that investor with his billion-dollar development will bring “jobs, jobs, jobs”.
And usually the jobs are divided into two main categories: construction and post construction jobs. The relevant minister will intone with the appropriate gravity that this investment today will see hundreds of jobs “in the construction phase” – and this is the clincher – “with a guarantee of 1,000 permanent jobs when this project is completed”.
Then there is the economic impact. Indeed recently one such project issued a release stating that its economic impact was going to be bigger than originally thought. Into this are thrown figures ranging from the hundreds of millions to be paid in casino taxes (if appropriate), the hundreds of millions in salaries, and of course the millions to be garnered by the Treasury.
Up until the Nineties, this model was acceptable, but recent developments suggest that the men and women who occupy or expect to occupy high office have to find a new model.
And not least of these issues coming to the fore is the right of people in an archipelagic country to determine how they should be allowed to live their lives in accordance to generations-old sustainable practices and traditions.
Nowhere has this conundrum been thrown up in such sharp relief as it has in Guana Cay where the Bahamians living there have had a relatively mega project at Baker’s Bay imposed upon them. Claiming that the “anchor development” was the way to develop The Bahamas, and particularly the less developed islands of the archipelago, the Government of The Bahamas apparently ignoring the history of such projects – Club Med and the Cotton Bay Club in South Eleuthera, Jack Tar in West End and the Treasure Cay Hotel – surged ahead signing Heads of Agreement for the latest iteration of the lodging business.
Realising that hotels are not the best way of generating revenue and hence profits the men who drive this business have come up with a new model; a model that generates multiple revenue streams. Hence the multi-purpose resort.
Indeed, having signed a heads of agreement to build a third hotel tower, and sensing the shift in the industry, Kerzner International morphed its Phase III from a single hotel tower to something called condotels (condominiums) and a block of suites or a suite hotel. It further created the Ocean Club Estates as well as the timeshare.
In Guana Cay, the Discovery Land Company arrived with and got approval for its plans to build an 18-hole golf course, a 250-slip marina, a housing estate for approximately 450 units, 70 additional residential units, an equity club with 400 members and the attendant service amenities, shops, staff housing and utility sheds.
In an assessment of the project Dr. Michael J. Risk, one of the world’s premier marine biologists, looked the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) upon which the government relied in arriving at its go ahead for the project.
He praised portions of the EIA stating in a February 2004 report that “the EIA was done to a high level of professional competence”, identifying the “sections on terrestrial ecology, water management and solid waste management stand out as being very good”.
Notwithstanding that endorsement, Professor Risk stated that he had “some concerns about the project as proposed”.
He identified three areas of concern: the degree of marina flushing seems minimal; protection of the marine environment from land-based stresses produced by the project is not well documented, nor have adequate baseline data been taken and the final concern “there seems insufficient concern re the restriction of traditional access by local inhabitants to sources of food and income”.
And therein lies the rub. As a keen social observer noted about Mayaguana, another anchor project, if “they had gone in with a bulldozer and ripped up the mangroves everyone would be up in arms against it, but tell me what is the difference between bulldozing the mangrove and imposing this development which will destroy Mayaguana as it has been known to generations of Bahamians?”
Presenting the reality in less graphic terms but no less compellingly, Dr. Risk stated that “any development of this size on an island this small has to be done extremely carefully, as the consequences could range from the severe to the catastrophic”.
Assuming that what it was doing was being done in the best interest of the local citizens, the government, in the tradition of governments before it, paid greater attention to the investors than to the citizens, who have been living there for several generations.
Being hardy and determined the people of Guana Cay have organised themselves into a formidable force, namely the Save Guana Cay Reef (SGCR), catching both the government and the investor off guard. Neither have been able to come forward with a meaningful response to the claims being made by the SGCR. And since neither investor nor government was in the habit of changing course in midstream they hope that the noise by a “few” disgruntled resident would, like a bad dream, eventually go away.
But when people’s way of life is being threatened, their constitutional right to live in their place in peace is being trampled then they take matters into their own hands and this is how after, proclaiming a start and finish date for the Baker’s Bay project on Guana Cay both the investor and the government find themselves entangled in the courts believing they will be vindicated; that eventually the mist will clear the miasma would have dissipated and we can all rejoice in the clarion call of “jobs jobs jobs” but perhaps just perhaps, not this time.
By: C. E. HUGGINS – Guardian Business Editor, The Nassau Guardian
