In spite of glowing reviews of its own performance, evidence shows a “total failure across the board of the policies of the PLP government,” according to FNM Chairman Desmond Bannister.
Speaking with the Journal days before the Christie administration celebrates its fourth year as the government, Mr. Bannister ripped into the PLP government for its performance on health and education in particular.
“Bahamians are concerned that the PLP government in four years has proved itself to be incompetent, essentially. They have not been able to deal with the major issues that affect Bahamian people,” Mr. Bannister said.
The FNM chairman gave a blistering review of the government’s performance, thus far, even laying the shocking results of the deadly prison escape in January that claimed two lives at the feet of the government.
“If you look at the violent prison break that we’ve never had before and the revelations that have come out of the Coroner’s Court this past week about the problems the prison officers experienced when they tried to respond-they couldn’t even get batteries working in equipment they should have had at their use,” Mr. Bannister charged.
“It tells of a level of incompetence that is permeating an entire government, and so while I wish them well in their celebrations, I believe the time would be better spent if they look at how they are going to address these critical issues that affect Bahamians on an everyday basis.”
Mr. Bannister scolded the government for its performance in the health sector, noting that the PLP had “some very good ideas in their manifesto,” specifically citing the planned regional hospital in Exuma.
“They’ve been unable to do anything in health care, and so while it was a nice thing for them to write down on paper that (they had) arranged for a hospital facility in Exuma, what have they done?”
Mr. Bannister also pointed to the infant mortality rate, recently pegged at 24 per 1000.
This figure means that 24 out of every thousand children born in the Bahamas die before they are one year old.
Mr. Bannister said that at the end of the Pindling era, the infant mortality rate was 24 per 1,000. He said that when the FNM left office in 2002, that rate had been cut to 12 per 1,000.
Those figures have been confirmed by the Ministry of Health.
“The rate has doubled from where the FNM left it. So out of every thousand children born in this country, 24 will die before age one. That is a stark condemnation of what the PLP government has done with respect to health,” Mr. Bannister said.
“Any expectant mother knows now that there is a one-in-twenty four chance that her child may not live to age one. That is a frightening prospect. That is something that ought to be addressed critically right now.”
Mr. Bannister also lambasted the government for a shortage of vaccines, which Health Minister Dr. Bernard Nottage recently chalked up to a billing error. Dr. Nottage also said that new supplies of vaccines had been en route, and had been scheduled to arrive shortly.
“A number of persons I know who went to the Flamingo Gardens clinic in the last week have not been able to get vaccinations for children,” Mr. Bannister said. “So we have a very, very serious health problem in our country.”
He said Dr. Nottage’s explanation for the vaccine shortage “does not wash with a mother that takes her child to a clinic and expects to get a vaccination for that child at a time when the child ought to get it, and finds that she cannot get it because somebody in health has not done their job. It doesn’t wash.”
Dr. Nottage, in Mr. Bannister’s view, ought to apologize, not explain.
According to Mr. Bannister, Bahamians have also taken umbrage with the government over the education system. Mr. Bannister said that the performance of students has continued to decline over the four years of the PLP administration.
“The PLP government has not built a single school, and they are right now haggling with teachers – the persons who provide education for our youngsters,” Mr. Bannister added.
Challenged on the reasonableness of the teachers’ demands (a total pay increase that would add up to $56 million over three years for the 3,500 teachers included in the bargaining unit), Mr. Bannister said it was not about the demands, but about the negotiation process.
“Notwithstanding whether anyone looking at it from the outside may call (those demands) unreasonable, the question is what is being done to bring negotiations to a quick head? What is being done to keep those teachers in the classroom?,” Mr. Bannister questioned.
He also criticized the government for dividing the energies of one person between two intensive ministries – Education and the office of the Attorney General.
“We had (the Ministry of Education) being shared by someone who (could) only give it half of his attention, while he was being Attorney General and dealing with crime, which is another critical area. That is something that ought to have been dealt with from the very outset,” Mr. Bannister said.
Citing other issues where he feels the government has failed, Mr. Bannister mentioned the illegal immigration problems facing the country, and how that might play into the health care issues.
“-The government has been so ineffective that perhaps we have a whole group of persons here who are straining the health care system, who are straining the education system, and (the government’s) policies with regard to immigration have been so non-existent that they have not been able to deal with the problem,” he suggested.
Mr. Bannister also chastised the government for signing heads of agreements for “gated communities” and selling land to foreign investors at “fire-sale prices,” insisting that few of those agreements would come to fruition. He said that the agreements that do materialize will mostly provide low-level employment for unskilled workers.
Bahamians, he said, are not being fooled by the signing of these agreements.
By: Quincy Parker, The Bahama Journal
