Wednesday, August 8, 2018
EDITOR, The Tribune.
In the 1970s, the Pindling government embarked on its disastrous programme of hotel ownership to create jobs for Bahamians.
The venture failed big time, saddling future generations of Bahamians with massive debt.
The cost of the loans to buy and build hotels was added to the national debt and the government (the people) will never repay it – they’ll just keep borrowing more to service the debt.
After reading Paul Wynn’s reasons for not buying the Lucayan Beach Hotel (Tribune Business August 2) and the warnings raised by CFAL President Anthony Ferguson (Nassau Guardian August 3), I don’t see how the government can justify taking such a HUGE risk with the people’s taxes.
Have we not learned from the utter fiscal madness of Hatchet Bay Farms, the hotels, BARTAD, BAMSI and Carnival? Our taxes were just increased significantly to help reduce the size of the debt racked up by this type of foolishness.
I understand the situation in Freeport is dire and the government is working hard to revive the economy, but that doesn’t justify pumping at least $100m of public funds into buying and relaunching a deteriorated structure that no-one else seems to want.
ATHENA DAMIANOS
Nassau,
August 6, 2018.
Comments
tetelestai says...
"The venture failed big time"...I recognize that this is Athena Damianos commenting. She probably can't spell objectivity (not at least when the discussion is about Pindling and the PLP), even if you give her a Bahamian and Greek dictionary. No sane, objective individual would categorize the policies of the PLP with respect to hotels as having failed. She conveniently forgets to mention too, by the way, that Pindling's hotel philosophy was purloined from the Sir Roland Symonette/Sir Stafford Sands model, which at the time, the Damianos' highly supported...but that's another discussion for another day. Were Pindling's hotel philosophy 100% successful? No, of course not. But did it, in the main, have an overall positive impact on the lives of The Bahamas and Bahamian citizens? Yes! The empirical evidence (don't take my word or Athena's) clearly supports this. The 2011 Bahamian FSAP report conducted by the IMF, the doctoral thesis and eventual books of Michael Craton, the II volume of Islanders in the Stream by Gail North Saunders and the World Bank's Bahamian financial review (up to 2000AD) all clearly and more importantly, empirically show that, for the most part, the hotel and service type initiatives post 1967 were generally beneficial to The Bahamas. Athena's despicable attempt to rewrite history is both an insult to Bahamians who can read and an affront to general decency as well. But again, what can you expect from a Damianos.
Posted 9 August 2018, 2:20 p.m. Suggest removal
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