Toward Orderly Growth

As a direct consequence, today’s Bahamas is that kind of place where individualism and greed are pervasive.

Because of their deep involvement in this culture, very many Bahamians have no real desire to pull together for the achievement of the common good.

This has led to that point where practically everyone is apparently consumed with individual well-being, others who might have been helped are left to fester and rot.

Some who might have suffered have decided that they would do whatever they have to do in order to survive. On occasion, this calls for people to become ever and ever more consummate in the arts and sciences involved in tribalism and its attendant cannibalism.

We must – as a people united in service and love in and to the Commonwealth of The Bahamas – decide that we must make this place we call home as peaceful, productive, decent and honest as we possibly could.

This – in turn – demands that more resources should be put into our schools, our work-places, neighborhoods and communities so that our people can understand that true national development is all about people and their well-being.

True national development must involve far more than merely having access to jobs, however well-paying. This must involve investing deeply into areas like schooling and in the provision of other vitally needed public goods.

Experience teaches that if the private sector is allowed to grow at the expense of the public, chaos ensues. By the same logic, when the public sector intrudes into areas that should be left to market forces – commerce is left retarded- and of course, workers suffer.

Any comprehensive plan for the orderly growth and development of the Bahamas must encompass and entail the hammering out of a consensus for a vision of what The Bahamas is to look like in the near and more distant future.

Our nation is still small enough and homogeneous enough for all parties concerned to agree on some principles that should guide us, moving forward.

While seemingly little more than a cliché, it is precisely true that where there is no vision, the people will perish.

It is equally the case that where and when the blind are called to lead the blind, the ditch becomes their mutual resting place.

We make these points – albeit preliminarily – as we underscore the need for this nation’s political directorate, its scholars, media, business, the Church, unions and other civic associations – to hammer out some consensus on the principles that should and could under-gird this nation’s more orderly growth and development, moving forward.

Time is of the essence; since so much has already been lost. Indeed, there is a sense we are getting that – even now – some of our nation’s youth are undergoing serious hurt and harm – thus setting the stage for even more problems down the road.

This is by no means inevitable.

Even now, we can begin to forge a greater sense of community at the neighbourhood level and in such a way that people in community would be so bonded that they help and protect the spaces they share.

In the final analysis, it is either chaos or community that beckons.

We must – for the sake of our nation’s youth and this nation’s future – work together to hammer out a consensus as to where we go from here.

The choices ahead are as they have always been – towards community or pell-mell, towards social disintegration and chaos.

Such a failed-state scenario has already engulfed some societies in Africa and today seems to be on the agenda for the Republic of Haiti – a nation and a people who have already endured more than their fair share of tragedies and reversals.

If we are not careful, we too can fail.

We can – as a people – work together to help shore up the foundations of our nation; especially if we focus on doing our level best to make of this nation a real commonwealth.

Such recognition would then push us all to that point where our youth are cherished and where when money is put aside for their health, education and welfare. Then we would in truth and in fact be investing in our nation’s future.