By SENATOR

DION FOULKES

Dear Prime Minister,

The Scriptures remind us, "Whatever you do to the least of my brothers, that you do unto me." I appeal to you to reinstate the 80 terminated officers of the Urban Renewal Programme.

These men and mostly women are hard-working Bahamians with significant personal and family obligations. The majority are mothers and grandmothers who are the sole providers for their families.

It is unconscionable that your administration, which campaigned on the two central issues of crime / Urban Renewal and job creation, has fired trained Urban Renewal officers deliberately adding Bahamians to the unemployment line.

While you and your party spoke of putting Bahamians first, apparently that was just a slogan, as it is now clear that you never intended to do so.

These 80 Bahamians now find themselves in a precarious position where they are unable to pay mortgage or rent, car loans, school fees, and health care and utility bills, nor buy food and clothing for themselves and their children and other dependents. Some of them are taking care of an elderly parent.

Their tenuous position is exacerbated by the fact that the prospects of finding new employment are extremely difficult. In terms of employment, your government has begun not by adding jobs, but by firing Bahamians

That your government would fire all 42 of the Urban Renewal staff in Grand Bahama is particularly unconscionable given that island's even more severe economic challenges.

Mr Prime Minister, that same beach at Freeport, on which you alleged that unemployed Bahamians were sleeping, may now actually become a refuge for some of those fired and their household.

Shame on you.

I end with a quote from the late US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to which former Prime Minister Hubert A Ingraham often referred: "The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much, it is whether we provide enough for those who have little."